Bourdieu and Latour in STS: Lets Leave Aside All the

Facts for A While

by
Lee Claiborne Nelson
M.A., Aarhus University, 2011
B.A., Dalhousie University, 2008

A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR

THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF ARTS
in
The Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies
(Science and Technology Studies)
THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA
(Vancouver)
September 2014
Lee Claiborne Nelson, 2014

Abstract
Through the lens of the English-speaking Science and Technology Studies (STS) community, the
relationship between Pierre Bourdieu and Bruno Latour has remained semi-opaque. This thesis
problematizes the Anglo understanding of the Bourdieu-Latour relationship and unsettles the
resolve that maintains the distance that STS has kept from Bourdieu. Despite many similarities
between these two scholars, Bourdieu has remained a distant figure to STS despite his
predominance in disciplines from which STS frequently borrows and the relevance of his corpus
to topics dear to the heart of STS. This is in part due to Latour's frequent criticisms of Bourdieu
by name, Latours philosophical disagreements with Kant and neoKantians, and Latours
prestige in STS, and partially due to Bourdieus somewhat indirect or orthogonal ways of
addressing natural and physical sciences and technology. Due to the fact that the writings of both
needed to be translated from the original French to be received by Anglo audiences, important
cultural, stylistic, and rhetorical nuances were lost, mistranslated, or not translated across the
linguistic and geographical divides. Including these distinctions is invaluable to understanding
their relationship and further weakens the justification for Bourdieu's absence from STS.

ii

Preface
This thesis is original, unpublished, independent work by the author, Lee Claiborne Nelson.

iii

Table of Contents
Abstract..........................................................................................................................................ii
Preface..........................................................................................................................................iii
Table of Contents..........................................................................................................................iv
List of Tables.................................................................................................................................v
Acknowledgements.......................................................................................................................vi
Dedication....................................................................................................................................vii
1. Introduction................................................................................................................................1
2. Social/Practice ..........................................................................................................................6
3. Culture/Capital.........................................................................................................................11
4. Kant/Field/Network ................................................................................................................16
5. Reflexivity/Philosophy.............................................................................................................23
6. Anglo/French...........................................................................................................................28
7. Conclusion...............................................................................................................................44
Bibliography.................................................................................................................................49

iv

List of Tables
Table 1. Bourdieu and Latours Methods and Conceptual
Tools.........................................................................................................................................12

Acknowledgements
First and foremost I would like to thank my thesis advisor, Stephen Petrina, for taking me
on as his student and for his patience, counsel, support, and enthusiasm. His professional
scholarship and personal friendship throughout this project, all of which began in his class on
Bruno Latour, has taught me more than he will ever know. I only wish that I was going to be
around for another year so that I could attend his upcoming class on Actor-Network-Theory.
I would also like to thank the head of the Science and Technology Studies Program at the
University of British Columbia, John Beatty, for his guidance throughout my degree, and for
having me as his Teaching Assistant. In addition, I am also indebted to Steven Taubeneck for his
support and mentorship, and for fostering a community which I hold to be one of my most
valuable treasures acquired during my time in Vancouver.
To my colleagues Alexis Beckett, Josef Garen, and Peggy Chiappetta, I wish to offer my
thanks and enduring love for our time together, and for putting up with Rouxdi's not-alwayspleasant presence. I would like to extend my thanks as well to Cameron Duncan and Matthew
Kruger-Ross, for both their friendship and lubricated intellectual stimulation their wit, insight,
and intelligence will be duly missed. To Marco Altamirano I owe the indebtedness one gives to
their guide. He is and has been my veritable sherpa through the moors of academia a
knowledgeable guide, mindful companion, and reassuring friend. My time in Vancouver could
not have been as precious without the reading groups which Jeremy Arnott, Sahand Farivar, and
Hannah Tollefson made most memorable my abounded appreciation is yours.
Finally I would like to thank my mother, Dorothy Duval Nelson, who has always been
my greatest support, loudest cheerleader, and ruthless editor.
To all, ya'll've been wonderful.

vi

Dedication

To my loving parents for your

unrelenting support and all that you
have given me, and to spell
check, without which I would not
have been able to act/be as I have in
the world.

vii

1. Introduction
This article addresses the history of Science and Technology Studies (STS) in light of
longstanding antagonisms between Pierre Bourdieu and Bruno Latour.1 Given that both are
within the French intellectual tradition, to what extent do antagonistic differences translate across
boarders and into contemporary contexts? Are there aspects of the conflict that have remained
opaque despite wide adoption of both thinkers across a diverse range of disciplines? Has
Bourdieus absence or exclusion from STS been taken for granted?2 Has this absence in STS
been justified, or rather, were Latour's criticisms of Bourdieu taken at face value given Latour's
posture within STS? What is at stake in answering these questions is how STS scholars
understand their discipline's lineage and development, and whether or not certain embedded
assumptions are appropriate. In short, to what extent is the history of STS predicated upon a
range of misunderstandings compressed into the Bourdieu-Latour conflict?3
1

In private correspondence, Mario Biagioli had this to say about including Pierre Bourdieu in his edited volume
The Science Studies Reader while other readers or handbooks of Science Studies, such as those published
by the Society for Social Studies of Science, did not: having been ignored by the Mertonians (whom he
despised), sidelined by SSK (because of their parochialism and church-like esprit des corps), and then publicly
'killed' by Latour, I am not sure [Bourdieu] will get a second chance in STS. The descriptive language Biagioli
uses in discussing Bourdieu's eventual banishment is interesting in relation to the religious metaphor Steve
Fuller invokes to describe the history of STS. Private email correspondence on October 3rd, 2013.
In his obituary for Bourdieu, for instance Breslau ends matter of factly: The field of science studies since 1975
has not followed the research programme sketched by Bourdieu, although there have been a number of studies
that have either applied or adapted Bourdieus approach. The past 20 years or so have seen an eclipse of the
social in the science of science. Daniel Breslau, Pierre Bourdieu (1 August 1930 23 January 2002), Social
Studies of Science 32 (2002): 631-635. See also e.g., Ina Spiegel-Rsing, Derek John de Solla Price, Eds.,
Science, technology, and society: A cross-disciplinary perspective, Sage Publications, 1977; Handbook of
Science and Technology Studies, ed. Sheila Jasanoff, Gerald E. Markle, James C. Petersen, Trevor Pinch, Sage
Publications, 1995, The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, 3rd edition, ed. Edward J. Hackett, Olga
Amsterdamska, Michael E. Lynch, Judy Wajcman, Wiebe E. Bijker, MIT Press, 2007.] Bourdieu is mentioned
in these texts, but sparingly (once in the first, and four times each in the second and third).
Douglas Allchin details well in his paper Pseudohistory and Pseudoscience what is at stake: in speaking about
science, Allchin states that the concern is not false history per se, but pseudohistory. Pseudohistory conveys
false ideas about the historical process of science and the nature of scientific knowledge, even if based on
acknowledged facts. Fragmentary accounts of real historical events that omit context can mislead, even while
purporting to show how science works (186) He continues: pseudohistory need not be deliberate or
intentional. It may result from negligence or even naivety. [] One cannot understand science fully without
appreciating the controvers[ies]. And one cannot understand the controvers[ies] if some evidence is missing
(187). It must be noted that Pseudohistory may not include any outright falsities. But this does not mean that
the resulting story cannot 'lie' (188). Douglas Allchin, Pseudohistory and Pseudoscience, Science &
Education 13 (2004), 179-195.
1

This article problematizes our understanding of the relationship the controversy

between Bourdieu and Latour and the conflict between them in relation to STS. Much of the
discussion of and general perspective on the conflict indicates the absence of key contextual
matters that allow for more nuanced histories. The intent is to complicate our history and
understanding of the relationship between Bourdieu and Latour, which resulted in Bourdieu's
work remaining outside the reach of the interdisciplinary field of STS even in its most eclectic
quarters. No doubt the criticisms lobbed at Bourdieu by Latour have been fundamental to
shaping STS as distinct from SSK and HPS (though the borders still remain hazy, as identified
by Peter Dear and Sheila Jasanoff).4 Whether or not those criticisms hold fast with fidelity is
questionable given the context in which the criticisms were formed. Unquestionably many
criticisms Latour made of Bourdieu are important for STS scholars, but whether these criticisms
remain tenable is questionable.
Steve Fuller, not always a fan of Latour's, divides divergent currents in the history of STS
into two churches Low and High for indicating broad differences in style, concerns, and
genealogies. These terms date to the eighteenth century, where Low Church generally signified
evangelicalism and the pulpit, while High Church signified respect of authority and the ministry.
For Fuller, Low Church STS generally refers to Science, Technology, and Society, and High
Church to Science and Technology Studies. The mirror acronym with cosmetically different
titles aside, the difference can broadly be identified in interest, style, and emphasis. The Low
Church STS consists of such heterogeneous groups as policymakers, feminists, journalists, and
others with a concern for the problems that science has caused, has solved, and possibly can
solve in modern society,5 whereas the High Church STS consists of of philosophers,
4

Peter Dear and Sheila Jasanoff, Dismantling Boundaries in Science and Technology Studies, Isis 101 (2010),
759-774.
Carl Martin Allwood, Jan Barmark, and Steve Fuller, A Conversation with Steve Fuller, Configurations 8
2

sociologists, and historians of science, who share a largely intellectual interest in the hold that
science and scientific knowledge have over society,6 of which Latour is the most famous High
Churcher.7 According to Fuller, when he asked Latour in 1992 about the distinction between the
two, Latour admitted to not knowing that the Low Church STS even existed. Fuller describes the
general focus of the two churches at that time where the High Churches [were] following the
line of the Edinburgh School in cultivating the disciplinary identity of STS, whereas Low
Churches conceptualized STS primarily as a social movement designed to transform the
relationship of science work to the rest of society. 8 Though discussion of the distinction is now
less common, particularly due to more recent 'filling' or 'crossing' of the divide including much
of the recent work of Latour the distinction between Low and High Church STS can be more
readily seen by the patronage and absences found in High Church STS literature and references.
Bourdieu's relative absence from High Church STS recently prompted a special issue of Minerva
in 2011 entitled Beyond the Canon: Pierre Bourdieu and Science and Technology Studies to
address his absence in High Church STS scholarship.9 In the introductory article, the authors
observe that, though the topics Bourdieu popularized have gained attention in recent years,
relatively few scholars have integrated the conceptual tools developed by Pierre Bourdieu into
their work.10 Bourdieu's presence in Low Church STS and related fields, however, has remained
fairly strong. Perhaps largely due to Latour's criticisms of Bourdieu, rarely is Bourdieu
recognized within STS.

6
7

8
9

10

(Fall 2000): 390-391.

Ibid, 390.
Steve Fuller, Science Studies through the Looking Glass: An Intellectual Itinerary, in Beyond the Science
Wars: The Missing Discourse about science and society, ed. Ullica Segerstrale (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 2000), 210, fn. 9.
Ibid, 193.
Minerva is somewhat of a mix of 'low church' and high church journal, as affirmed by its subtitle, A Review
of Science, Learning and Policy.
Mathei Albert and Daniel Lee Kleinman. Bringing Pierre Bourdieu to Science and Technology Studies.
Minerva (September 2011): 263.
3

Given that STS, like Latour's work, is a bricolage of various tools, methods, and ideas,
the ascetic ideals which have led to and maintained a separation between Bourdieu's
methodologies or tools and STS is perhaps telling of a too hastily made decision or accepted
declaration. Peter Dear and Sheila Jasanoff argue that STS embraces as its field of investigation
knowledge and knowledge making, including the wider ramifications of producing various kinds
of authoritative knowledge (science writ large), embodying them in objects and material systems
(artifacts, instruments, and industries), and seeing how the resulting 'things,' epistemic and
otherwise, play their parts in such activities as law, policy, politics, social organization, religion,
aesthetic culture, the economy, and ethics.11 Hence, the neglect of certain useful or practical
tools due to philosophical or meta-theoretical differences founded upon one prominent scholar's
criticisms seems short-sighted at best. Though there have been insightful discussions of the
theoretical differences between Bourdieu and Latour, as well as arguments regarding the
legitimacy of certain aspects of the criticisms of each, suggestions that certain tools developed by
Bourdieu are no longer in vogue, despite their continued usefulness in other and related fields to
STS, is premature. Dear and Jasanoff take pause with Latour's proposal for what constitutes (and
does not constitute) STS, stating that if, as would be our contention, Latour's declaration [that
skeptical or critical approaches are dead] is based on an overly narrow and particular
construction of critical practices in and around science studies, then that claim, too, deserves
investigation with all the tools we have for explicating the use of knowledge of social and
political purposes, including the active making and unmaking of scholarly disciplines.12 And if,
at times, this essay seems biased or heavy handed when it comes to Latour, this is merely an
effect of his legacy within the history of STS, as well as a result of his numerous criticisms of

11
12

Dear and Jasanoff. Dismantling Boundaries, 772-773.

Ibid, 773.
4

Bourdieu.
Anders Blok and Torben Jensen, in Bruno Latour: Hybrid Thoughts in a Hybrid World,
make note of an important point that runs the risk of being glossed over in the historical
understanding of the Bourdieu-Latour conflict. It is worth noting, they state that Bourdieu's
criticisms takes its point of departure in Latour's early anthropology of science and technology,
as presented in Laboratory Life (1979). Many of Bourdieu's more specific points of criticism
may perhaps be defensible in the delimited context of this work, but they still emerge as
misleading in light of later displacements in Latour's thinking.13 Though Bourdieu's criticisms
of Latour are found in the last book before his death, Science of Science and Reflexivity (2001
original, 2004 English translation), to take that single text of Bourdieu's and weigh it with all of
the texts in which Latour has attacked Bourdieu would be a misleading or false equivalency. Of
course one cannot say in what ways Bourdieu would have responded to Latour's continued
criticisms. In wake of this second absence, we should take pause to properly assess the first
absence, that is, Bourdieu's banishment from STS.

13

Anders Blok and Torben Elgaard Jensen, Bruno Latour: Hybrid Thoughts in a Hybrid World, (New York:
Rouledge, 2011), 182, fn. 5.
5

2. Social/Practice
What is perhaps surprising in view of so much tension between Bourdieu and Latour is
that they were responding to similar issues and developed thematically similar solutions. Perhaps
it was due to the similarities that there was so much disagreement and need for distancing that
the younger Latour was so critical of the older (by seventeen years) and established Bourdieu (as
of 2007, Bourdieu was the second most cited author in the Humanities).14 Both took issue with
the old Cartesian dichotomies and dualism that seemed to produce so much confusion, and both
provided solutions to the dualities by focusing on practice: Latour developed a research
methodology to follow how science is practiced in the laboratory as a negotiation and
assemblage of human and nonhuman actants, and Bourdieu, concerned with how practice
instantiates the social world (The Logic of Practice, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Practical
Reason: On the Theory of Action), developed his Theory of Practice to analyze situated conflict
and differencing under a scope of habitus. Latour said that through STS there was a shifting
attention from the theory of science to its practice.15 However, the practice Latour mentions is
differentiated from Bourdieu's. In the Glossary of Pandora's Hope, Latour notes, Science
studies is not defined by the extension of social explanations to science, but by emphasis on the
local, material, mundane sites where the sciences are practiced. Thus the word 'practice
identifies types of studies that are exactly as far from the normative philosophies of science as
they are from the usual efforts of sociology [i.e., Bourdieu]. What has been revealed through the
study of practice is not used to debunk the claims of science, as in critical sociology, but to
multiply the mediators that collectively produce the sciences.16 Thus, though both are interested
14

15

16

Most cited authors of books in the humanities, 2007, Times Higher Education, accessed 6/15/2014,
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/405956.article.
Bruno Latour, Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1999), 294.
Ibid, 309.
6

in how practice constitutes the social world, what social world means is emphatically different:
for Bourdieu, the social world is defined by capital distribution amongst individuals in a state of
competition arranged according to class. Latour, for whom class plays no role whatsoever,
problematizes the qualifier social to describe the world as an assemblage, collective, or
network of humans and nonhumans, where both are considered participants treated as equals in
the creation and maintenance of said network.
Blok and Jensen state that for Bourdieu, sociology is a science that aims to break with
the self-understanding of social actors by way of theoretically re-constructing a social space
(field), structured around inequalities in economic and cultural capacities (capital). Only in this
way does sociology attain a critical potential via the objectification (Latour would say
'revelation') of the unacknowledged inequalities of power that shape all domains of society,
including science. For Latour, on the other hand, the sociology of associations is a method that
allows the researcher to follow how actors gradually build human and non-human networks, the
precise contours of which remain in never-ending empirical challenge; only by tracing these
networks does sociology achieve a constructive political and scientific relevance as a contributor
to negotiations within the hybrid collective. They conclude that in Bourdieu's view, the social
can be used to explain and criticize. To Latour, however, the social explains nothing; instead, it
should itself be explained through detailed empirical and historical studies.17 In Latour's view the
critical-humanist sociologist (read: Bourdieu) enjoys no privileged access to the realm of
criticism.18 Indeed, in We Have Never Been Modern, Latour describes two mutually exclusive
visions of the world that social scientists construct, one where humans have freedom and things

17

18

Latour has explained this using the terminology from the philosophy of science as a problematic mixing or
confusing of the explanandum with the explanans. Bruno Latour, The Politics of Explanation: an Alternative,
in Knowledge and Reflexivity: New Frontiers in the Sociology of Knowledge (London: Sage, 1988), 115-177.
Blok and Jensen, Bruno Latour: Hybrid Thoughts in a Hybrid World, 143.
7

are inert, the other where things are so active that humans are devoid of all choice. He states that
in the first denunciation objects count for nothing; they are just there to be used as the white
screen on to which society projects its cinema. But in the second, they are so powerful that they
shape the human society, while the social construction of sciences that have produced them
remains invisible. Objects, things, consumer goods, works of art are either too weak or too
strong.19 Though in that text Latour takes Bourdieu to task both by name and by implication,
Bourdieu has stated something similar: Social science oscillates between two seemingly
incompatible points of view, two apparently irreconcilable perspectives: objectivism and
subjectivism or, if you prefer, between physicalism and psychologism. On the one hand, it can
'treat social facts as things' according to the old Durkheimian precept, and thus leave out
everything that they owe to the fact that they are objects of knowledge, of cognitionor
misrecognitionwithin social existence. On the other hand, it can reduce the social world to the
representations that agents have of it, the task of social science consisting then in producing an
'account of the accounts' produced by social subjects.20 The bifurcation of the world into
subjects and objects beginning with Kant is acknowledged by both Latour and Bourdieu. But
whereas Bourdieu attempts to overcome it with his notions of habitus, Latour avoids it
altogether, advising, don't try to overcome the subject-object distinction. It's not made to be
overcome. It's not a defect of philosophy; it's made to be un-overcomable. It's made to make the
distinction impossible. It's made to do politics. It's made to do war. It's made to do science
wars.21 For Bourdieu, the two moments in Kant stand in a dialectical relationship such that the
perception of the social world is the product of a double structuring22 where Social existence
19
20
21

22

Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 53.
Pierre Bourdieu, Social Space and Symbolic Power, Sociological Theory 7 (1989): 14-15.
Colin Barron, Bruno Latour, and Steven Fuller, A Strong Distinction between Humans and Non-Humans is no
Longer Required for Research Purposes: A Debate Between Bruno Latour and Steve Fuller, History of the
Human Sciences 16 (2003): 79.
Bourdieu, Social Space and Symbolic Power, 20.
8

thus means difference, and difference implies hierarchy, which in turn sets off the endless
dialectic of distinction and pretension, recognition and misrecognition, arbitrariness and
necessity.23 As Loc Wacquant explains, neither habitus nor field has the capacity unilaterally
to determine social action. It takes the meeting of disposition and position, the correspondence
(or disjuncture) between mental structures and social structures, to generate practice.24 The
meeting place, the relation between not just the field and objects within the field, nor between the
rules of the field and capital, is the overall orientation of a field orchestrated by habitus. In other
words, it is from habitus that subjects and objects are produced in their particular historical
manifestation, and thus habitus precedes these categories.
Latour's move to avoid the dichotomy altogether echoes both Alfred North Whitehead
and Gilles Deleuze: Whitehead in identifying the bifurcation and avoiding it by focusing on
events, and Deleuze for developing an alternative philosophical genealogy from pre-Kantian
philosophers to post-Kantian philosophers without going through Kant in order to provide an
alternative history of modern philosophy. Together, both allow Latour to avoid the subjectobject, Nature-Society, primary-secondary dichotomies when applying an anthropology that
will no longer have to solve said dualities because they never arise. Latour, in Reassembling
the Social, states of his Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) that it's important to notice that this has
nothing to do with a 'reconciliation' of the famous object/subject dichotomy. To distinguish a
priori 'material' and 'social' ties before linking them together again makes the very task of
linking nearly impossible.25 Bourdieu, however, because he is interested in human agents,
obviously constructs a view of the social with humans as the central figures in a historically
23

24
25

Loc J. D. Wacquant, Pierre Bourdieu, in Key Sociological Thinkers, 2nd ed., ed. Rob Stones. (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 265.
Ibid, 296.
Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007), 75.
9

situated context of nonhumans. Although in so doing he comes under the wrath and criticisms of
Latour, there are still other similarities to consider before ruling on whether or not the criticisms
hold, given their different interests.

10

3. Culture/Capital
While Latour states that the role of anthropologists is to account for the multiplicity of
agencies entertained by the collectives with which they come into contact,26 Bourdieu's
approach takes the position that There can be no explanation of human actions without
reference to the culture in which they occurred. Thus, Bourdieu's framework demands work by
anthropologists and cultural historians to make sense of the actual interplays of interests.27
There are, therefore, clear differences insofar as what is to be taken as important from
anthropological considerations: Bourdieu's concern is human interests, while Latour's is humannonhuman mediation. Dualism has its charms, notes Latour, but it takes the anthropologist
only a few months of fieldwork to notice that dichotomies do not have, among the Moderns in
any case, the extraordinary explanatory virtues that the anthropology of remote cultures so
readily attributes to them. The raw and the cooked, nature and culture, words and things, the
sacred and the profane, the real and the constructed, the abstract and the concrete, the savage and
the civilized, and even the dualism of the modern and the premodern, do not seem to get our
investigator very far.28 Here we can tease out a difference in research perspectives: Bourdieu's
project is prescriptive for the purpose of analysis and how to explain, while Latour's is simply
descriptive.29 Both are interested in providing the researcher with an unproblematic
26

27

28

29

It should be noted that Latour's anthropology has shifted focus in the past decade, from symmetrical
anthropology to what he calls diplomatic anthropology, though he by no means abandons symmetry. For this
transition, see Bruno Latour, The Recall of Modernity: Anthropological Approaches, Cultural Studies Review
13 (2007): 11-30. In addition, the type of anthropology that Latour champions reconciles the social or cultural
anthropology with the anthropology of nature which, he says, had hitherto maintained the bifurcation despite
necessarily crossing over into the domain of the other (see Bruno Latour, Waking up from 'conjecture' as well
as from 'dream' a presentation of AIME, Keynote lecture at the American Anthropological Association
Meeting, Chicago, Illinois, November 21st, 2013).
Sergio Sismondo, Bourdieu's Rationalist Science of Science: Some Promises and Limitations, Cultural
Sociology 5 (2011): 85.
Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2013): 146.
Latour has often and in many places stated that he is interested in description over explanation, and refers to the
problematic moors of explanation (for a clear account, see Bruno Latour, The Politics of Explanation: an
Alternative, in Knowledge and Reflexivity, New Frontiers in the Sociology of Science, ed. Steve Woolgar,
11

methodology, though their suggestions are quite different; their concerns manifest themselves in
the type of anthropology they advocate. Bourdieu's exemplary sciences are theoretical ones, and
perhaps the prototype of them all is theoretical sociology, allowing reflexivity to be an easy
consequence. Unfortunately, this allows him almost entirely to neglect the materiality of
scientific work. Despite Bourdieu's attention to the material dimensions of habituses in other
contexts, his science is almost entirely ideal.30 However, this assessment might not be entirely
accurate, even if it holds true in general when considering the work of Latour. In the introduction
to Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action, Bourdieu states that the philosophy of action,
which he is proposing, asserts itself form the outset by breaking with a number of established
notions which have been introduced into scholarly discourse without examination ('subject,'
'motivation,' 'actor,' 'role,' etc.) and with a whole series of socially powerful oppositions
individual/society, individual/collective, conscious/unconscious, interested/disinterested,
objective/subjective, and so forth which seem to constitute ordinary thought.31 The desired
outcome of both Bourdieu's and Latour's methodology contain strikingly similar aspirations as
well as motivations.
Latour, since his goal is to treat humans and nonhumans symmetrically, decidedly
incorporates objects in a way that Bourdieu does not. When Bourdieu speaks of fields of
power, says Latour, then science, technology, texts, and the contents of activities disappear.32
Objects nonetheless are not absent from Bourdieu, and in fact have a central locale in Bourdieu's

30
31
32

(London: Sage Publications, 1988), 155-177). In addition, Latour often speaks of the analyst in unfavourable
terms, for example: We must either part company with the analysts who have only one fully worked out
metaphysics or 'follow the actors themselves' who are getting by with more than one (Latour, Reassembling the
Social, 61). It is clear, then, in Latour's view that analysis and explanation are intimately linked if preceding
description. Analysis may be available, but only after description where, in Latour's common adage, If a
description remains in need of an explanation, it means that it is a bad description (Latour, Reassembling the
Social, 137.).
Sismondo, Bourdieu's Rationalist Science of Science: Some Promises and Limitations, 91.
Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), viii.
Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 6.
12

notion of capital. For example, in describing social capital, Bourdieu and Wacquant state,
capital is the sum of the resources, actual or virtual, that accrue to an individual or a group by
virtue of possessing a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual
acquaintance and recognition.33 Said resources include nonhumans and relational properties
afforded to the individual depending upon their location within a particular system or network
(i.e., field). Against what is often suggested of him, Bourdieu does include instruments and
technology, though they never become a central topic of investigation. For example:
One of the most powerful instruments of rupture lies in the social history of
problems, objects, and instruments of thought, that is, with the history of the work of
social construction of reality (enshrined in such common notions as role, culture,
youth, etc., or in taxonomies) which is carried out within the social world itself as a
whole in this or that specialized field and, especially, in the field of social
sciences. I think for instance of all those things that have become so common, so
taken for granted, that nobody pays any attention to them, such as the structure of a
court of law, the space of a museum, a voting booth, the notion of 'occupational
injury' or of a 'cadre,' a two-by-two table or, quite simply, the act of writing or taping.
History thus conceived is inspired not by an antiquarian interest but by a will to
understand why and how one understands.34
Though aware of the role and history of various nonhumans, Bourdieu never focused specifically
on the history of technology nor elevated material histories on a par with human history. Since
capital, field, and habitus are all intimately linked, though the imperative of reflexivity for the
social scientists that Bourdieu advocates is unquestionably subjectivist, the tools Bourdieu
provides introduces a material dimension. In other words, part of Bourdieu's project is a
consideration of not simply what tools the social scientist should use, but also how researchers
should understand their use of those tools.
In general, we can categorize Latours and Bourdieus different emphasis and concern as
follows: Latour is concerned with the methods of research as they pertain to their subject-matter,
33

34

Pierre Bourdieu and Loc J. D.Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2005), 119.
Ibid, 238.
13

while Bourdieu is concerned with the researcher's methods (Table 1).

Table 1. Bourdieu and Latours Methods and Conceptual Tools.

Bourdieu

Latour

([Researcher tools] subject-matter)

(Researcher [tools subject-matter])

One of the difficulties for those who want to follow Latour is the anxiety about choosing
the wrong actor to follow/trace, and Latour admits that there is a constant danger that the scholar
will have to retrace their steps and take a different path. Latour, as we know, is obsessed with
controversies, where the social assemblage is under great negotiation, and where properties of
various actants are being swapped, borrowed, changed, and created. However, a Bourdieusian
analysis may provide clues to what particular actors to follow through studying the snapshot of
before and after a controversy. A major difference between Bourdieu and Latour centres around
what can be termed 'the symbolic,' encapsulated in the seemingly synonymous terms they each
deploy, namely field and frame or network. Bourdieu's field is a symbolic representation
of the distribution of individuals according to their capital along particular coordinates, whereas
for Latour social interaction should not be understood as purely symbolic, but rather as
something material; as buildings, room divisions, fences, computer networks, etc.35 For Latour,
nonhumans and humans constitute a network of a social world or collective, and often certain
nonhumans are older, more stable, and more virile than their human counterparts. However,
everything is constantly under negotiation and threat of change, and thus nothing is taken as
fixed. This is nothing Bourdieu would deny, since, after all, humans are distributed in his field
according to nonhumans such as institutional ties, familial history, land, banks, manner of
35

Blok and Jensen, Bruno Latour: Hybrid Thoughts in a Hybrid World, 115.
14

speech, clothes, and possessions. However, in Bourdieu's field nonhuman actors have always
already acted.
Bourdieu's field is always a snapshot of a particular social arrangement in which the
subjects he is interested in are humans. There is undoubtedly a particular Gestalt figure-ground
distinction between the human-figures and the nonhuman-ground, which would seem to recreate
the subject-object dichotomy and place priority on the actions of the human subject. However, is
this not also re-created in Latour since non-human actants tend to act in more long-lasting,
durable and reliable ways than humans?36 The difference between the two is revealed in the
field/frame distinction. Bourdieu's field assuredly becomes a useless tool when everything is in
flux due to its 'fixing'. Though it would be possible to use Latour's framing instead of Bourdieu's
field during times of relative calm, this does not mean that doing so would accomplish the same
goals or be as useful for explicating particular social factors. With Latour we are able to tell the
story of a controversy as it happens before the researcher's eyes, but with Bourdieu we are able to
tell where we were and where we are now.37

36
37

Ibid.
It should be noted that Latour does provide a type of 'fixing' as in his AND-OR graphs that utilizes a type of
Schmittian friend-enemy distinction to display associative changes over time. These graphs pin two central
actors in a controversy against one another, and details changing associations (networks) each actor engenders
over time. At each horizontal AND level, the actors are fixed, and only by comparing the vertical OR levels to
one another do you get a visual description of strengthening or weakening networks over time. These graphs are
used to depict how one actor 'wins out' over another by forming greater and greater human and nonhuman allies
across a controversy. See pages 158-164 of Pandora's Hope, Bruno Latour, Where are the Missing Masses?
The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts, in Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in
Sociotechnical Change, ed. Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992): 225-258, Bruno
Latour, Philippe Mauguin, and Genevive Teil, A Note on Socio-Technical Graphs, Social Studies of Science
22 (1992): 33-57, and Bruno Latour, Technology is Society Made Durable, in A Sociology of Monsters:
Essays on Power, Technology and Domination, ed. John Law, (London: Routledge, 1991): 103-131, for
description and figures of Latour's use of the AND-OR distinction. Though there is not room for it here,
comparing Latour's AND-OR graphs with Bourdieu's Field graphs might identify additional similarities given
that they both depend upon the inclusion of humans and nonhumans, though for Bourdieu the nonhumans are
always 'behind' humans rather than 'next to' as for Latour. Might these be complementary?
15

4. Kant/Field/Network
Both Latour and Bourdieu resolve or at least avoid the problematic imposition of such
distinctions such as the subject-object dichotomy. Indeed, the first sentence of the Introduction to
Bourdieu's The Logic of Practice is: Of all the oppositions that artificially divide social
sciences, the most fundamental, and the most ruinous, is the one that is set up between
subjectivism and objectivism. The very fact that this division constantly reappears in virtually the
same form would suffice to indicate that the mode of knowledge which it distinguishes are
equally indispensable to a science of the social world that cannot be reduced either to a social
phenomenology or to a social physics.38 However, since Bourdieu treats nonhumans differently
from humans, Latour sees Bourdieu as committing the original sin of the moderns: bifurcating
the world into subjects and objects. Latour blames this on Bourdieu's neo-Kantianism, rendering
the entirety of Bourdieu's methodological approach for Latour suspect, if not bankrupt, from the
start.
Much of the difference between Bourdieu and Latour can be understood with respect to
their relationships with Kant. As Frdric Vandenberghe explains, sociology
remains fractured along national lines. This probably explains why Anglo-Saxon
commentators, who are unfamiliar with the rationalist tradition of French
pistmologie (Bachelard, Koyr, Canguilhem, Duhem, Cavaills) or with the
German neo-Kantian tradition of Wissenschaftslehre (Lask, Cassirer, Panofsky),
project their own brand of the philosophy of science (Bhaskar) on Bourdieus
position, describing him as a critical realist.39
Regardless of Bourdieu's actual indebtedness to Kant, it is clear that this is the guise in which
38
39

Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 26.
He continues, This erroneous attribution is, however, easily understandable, as it results from the confusion
between the epistemological and the metatheoretical levels of analysis. In epistemological terms, Bourdieu is a
neo-Kantian, and thus an idealist; in metatheoretical terms, he is a Marxist-Weberian, and thus a materialist; the
conflation of both levels of analysis leads to the label realist, which is the materialist brand of epistemology.
Frdric Vandenberghe, The Real is Relational: An Epistemological Analysis of Pierre Bourdieu's Generative
Structuralism. Sociological Theory 17 (March 1999): 38.
16

Latour sees him. Latour states that most of the social sciences and most of philosophy since
Kant have been without a world. Things do nothing. What you learn at the beginning of
sociology 101, especially if its continental theory 101, Bourdieu or Frankfurt 101, is precisely
that things do not act.40 Latour goes on elsewhere to state that with this Kantian influence,
There exists no relation whatsoever between 'the material' and 'the social world,' because it is
this very division which is a complete artifact.41 From this, Latour states that we must be forced
to abandon the subject-object dichotomy, a distinction that prevents the understanding of
collectives.42 However, whether to overcome the dichotomy (Bourdieu) or avoid it all together
(Latour), both Bourdieu and Latour vie for a similar solution, namely focusing on practice and
making primary relations. Willem Schinkel, in his exploration of Bourdieus and Latour's focus
on the 'relational', suggests that the notion of the relational is at the core of both Bourdieu's
and Latour's analysis. It is on this concept that the two converge, but it is at the same place that
their positions are dispersed. Bourdieu's relational sociology is opposed to Latour's relationist or
relativist sociology. However, this concept of relation is articulated differently in each case.43
Thus, both attempt to move beyond, or at least do away with, the problematic subject-object
distinction.
But is Latour's assessment of Bourdieu accurate? Though Bourdieu may in fact be
Kantian in some respects, things do act, and we are able to see how they act whether they are
things such as names, materials, manner of speaking, membership to an institution, etc. by how
they affect the location of human actors in a field. The concept of field makes it possible,
explains Bourdieu, to conceptualize, for each agent, his or her position in all possible spaces of
40

41
42
43

Bruno, Latour and Fuller, A Strong Distinction between Humans and Non-Humans is No Longer Required for
Research Purposes: A Debate Between Bruno Latour and Steve Fuller, 79.
Latour. Reassembling the Social, 75-76.
Latour, Pandora's Hope, 180.
Willem Schinkel, Sociological discourse of the relational: the cases of Bourdieu & Latour, The Sociological
Review 55 (2007): 725.
17

competition (it being understood that, while each field has its own logic and its own hierarchy,
the hierarchy that prevails among the different kinds of capital and the statistical link between
the different types of assets tends to impose its own logic on the other fields).44 Elsewhere he
states, Both habitus and field (and also the specific form of capital produced and reproduced in
this field) are the site of a sort of conatus, of a tendency to perpetuate themselves in their being,
to reproduce themselves in that which constitutes their existence and their identity.45 Though
Bourdieu may indeed reinscribe the bifurcation which Latour detests, it is not there ab initio but
is rather an analytic category inscribed post hoc to a habitus for identifying differing though
non-independent types of historical influences. Though Bourdieu is always focused on
humans, they are entirely imbedded in competition (or in negotiations, to use Latour's preferred
terminology) with other humans, histories, institutions, traditions, and material conditions any
of which are unable to be divorced from the others which suggests that the bifurcation in
Bourdieu is an analytic distinction rather than an ontological one. What Bourdieu is trying to
address in his theory of practice is the problem of agency. He wants his fellow social scientists to
realize that agency does not have to be limited to human beings but they can emerge from human
practices,46 practices which involve at all times humans and nonhumans.
Bourdieu's field is a three-fold relationship between the capital that corresponds to the
field, the rules or logics of that capital, and the location of the individuals, groups of individuals,
or institutions, in a topology that orients individuals, groups of individuals, or institutions in
relation to one another according to their capital. Capital

44
45

46

Pierre Bourdieu, The Social Space and the Genesis of Groups, Theory and Society 4 (1985): 724.
Pierre Bourdieu, Concluding Remarks: For a Sociogenetic Understanding of Intellectual Works, in Bourdieu:
Critical Perspectives, ed. Craig Calhoun, Edward LiPuma, and Moishe Postone (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1993), 274.
Robert N. St. Clair, Walter E. Rodriguez, and Carma Nelson, Habitus and Communication Theory,
Intercultural Communication Studies 14 (2005): 143.
18

comes in three principle species: economic (material and financial assets), cultural
(scarce symbolic goods, skills and titles) and social (resources accrued by virtue of
membership in a group). A fourth species, symbolic capital, designates the effects of
any form of capital when people do not perceive them as such (as when we attribute
lofty moral qualities to members of the upper class as a result of their 'donating' time
and money to charities). The position of any individual, group or institution in social
space may thus be charted by two coordinates, the overall volume and the
composition of the capital they detain. A third coordinate, variation over time of this
volume and composition, records their trajectory through social space and provides
invaluable clues as to their habitus by revealing the manner and path through which
they reached the position they presently occupy. 47
The rules of a field are the structure and that which dictates the behaviour and effectiveness of
capital in that field. The translation of symbolic capital into different fields, and whether or not
and to what extent the rules of those respective fields adequately account for or accommodate the
translated capital, are central concerns for how fields relate to one another. The rules for
production of certain types of capital in one field can become symbolic capital in both that field
and other fields. The logic that supports that capital is sustained most purely in its own field of
production. Bourdieu states that symbolic capital is any property (any form of capital whether
physical, economic, cultural or social) when it is perceived by social agents endowed with
categories of perception which cause them to know it and to recognize it, to give it value.48
What is clear is that the various forms of capital are not simply things that the various subjects
possess, but rather are active in the structuring of a field and the respective locations of
individual within them. Capital is thus the shorthand attribution of a structure's properties to the
individual. When translating capital from one field to another, impurities occur, since the logic of
each field has different rules for creating or maintaining the fidelity of symbolic capital from
fields outside their own. Each field can be understood in institutionalized terms: government,
academia, church, science, etc. Therefore, the assets or types of capital economic, social,

47
48

Wacquant, Pierre Bourdieu, 268.

Bourdieu, Practical Reason, 47.
19

cultural, scientific, and symbolic are nonhumans recognized and congealed in titles, names, and
materials which affect the status of an individual within a particular context. Though these are
linked to humans, orbiting humans and affecting their ability to act, be heard, and interact with
other members in the field, they nonetheless do work and are not simply inert; they lend to the
human subject certain properties that alter the dynamics of subject depending upon the particular
field in question and the assets of other subjects. This of course will not suffice for Latour,
despite the resemblance of the rules of a field to Latour's most recent articulation of felicity
conditions of various modes of existence,49 for it maintains the focus on humans rather than
treating humans and nonhumans symmetrically.
In adopting Michel Serres' terminology of quasi-subjects and quasi-objects, Latour is
interested in the exchange of properties between subjects and objects. In We Have Never Been
Modern, after arguing for the avoidance of the subject-object dichotomy and the usurping of the
Kantian bifurcation of nature and culture found within the social sciences, he eventually allows
some retention of the subject-object terminology; stating Using the two dimension at once, the
longitude and the latitude, we may now be able to locate the positions of these strange new
hybrids and to understand how come that we had to wait for science studies in order to define
what, following Michel Serres, I shall call quasi-objects, quasi-subjects.50 Bifurcation, Latour
explains elsewhere, is what happens whenever we think the world is divided into two sets of
things: one which is composed of the fundamental constituents of the universeinvisible to the
eyes, known to science, real and yet valuelessand the other which is constituted of what the
mind has to add to the basic building blocks of the world in order to make sense of them.51 With
Whitehead Latour is able to undo or avoid this Kantian division by developing an understanding
49
50
51

See Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns.

Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 51.
Bruno Latour, What is Given in Experience?, Boundary 2 32 (2005): 226-227.
20

of the event of the grasping itself by science as being something that happens not only in the
world but to the world (emphasis added).52 This is in part why Latour is obsessed with
controversies,53 as he explains in the following:
Action should remain a surprise, a mediation, and event. It is for this reason that we
should begin, here again, not from the 'determination of action by society', the
'calculative abilities of individuals', or the 'power of the unconscious' as we would
ordinarily do, but rather from the under-determination of action, from the
uncertainties and controversies about who and what is acting when 'we' actand
there is of course no way to decide whether this source of uncertainty resides in the
analyst or in the actor.54
Controversies for Latour are the place of battles, negotiations and exchanges amongst many
participating actors. If we call metaphysics the discipline inspired by the philosophical tradition
that purports to define the basic structure of the world, says Latour, then empirical
metaphysics is what the controversies over agencies lead to since they ceaselessly populate the
world with new drives and, as ceaselessly, contest the existence of others.55 With the notion of
the event, which avoids the Kantian division, Latour adds his notion of hybrids, a third
category besides subjects and objects, which likewise avoids conforming to either of the
categories. These hybrids or quasi-objects do not belong to Nature, or to Society, or to the
subject; they do not belong to language, either.56 In this way, Latour creatively avoids the
subject-object gulf left by Kant.
Latour's proposal to treat humans and nonhumans semiotically the same collapses the
figure-ground distinction onto the same ontological plane such that all actants from the
beginning are given similar treatment. Although Latour takes Bourdieu to be emblematic of
instantiating such a figure-ground distinction in the construction of a field consisting of humans
52
53
54
55
56

Ibid, 230.
Interview with Latour in Blok and Jensen, Bruno Latour: Hybrid Thoughts in a Hybrid World, 160.
Latour, Reassembling the Social, 45.
Ibid, 50-51.
Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 65.
21

at the fore and nonhuman capital in the background, Bourdieu nonetheless, in his notion of
habitus, likewise seeks to collapse any ontological distinction which may shine through from his
theoretical approach: As the mediation between past influences and present stimuli, habitus is at
once structured, by the patterned social forces that produced it, and structuring: it gives form and
coherence to the various activities of an individual across the separate spheres of life. Habitus
is also a principle of both social continuity and discontinuity: continuity because it stores social
forces into the individual organism and transports them across time and space; discontinuity
because it can be modified through the acquisition of new dispositions and because it can trigger
innovation whenever it encounters a social setting discrepant with the setting from which it
issues.57 Out of the continuity-discontinuity develops a generative structuring of the social
world, which can be analyzed in terms of the field. Bourdieu's field is based on a non-Cartesian
social ontology that refuses to split object and subject, intention and cause, materiality and
symbolic representation, with the goal of overcoming the debilitating reduction of sociology to
either an objectivist physics of material structures or a constructivist phenomenology of
cognitive forms by means of a genetic structuralism capable of subsuming both. He does this by
systematically developing not a theory stricto censu so much as a sociological method consisting
essentially in a manner of posing problems, in a parsimonious set of conceptual tools and
procedures for constructing objects and for transferring knowledge gleaned in one area of inquiry
into another.58 The generative aspect of Bourdieu's field contains within them the events which
are born out of and give rise to the structures of habitus.

57
58

Wacquant, Pierre Bourdieu, p 268.

Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 5.
22

5. Reflexivity/Philosophy
What should not go unnoticed is the result of Bourdieu's reflexivity, or of sociology of
sociology. To avoid the subject (researcher) - object (society) divide, which seems inherent in all
scientific study, Bourdieu's suggestion of reflexivity distorts the ease in which this analytic
division is made. Bourdieu states, reflexivity is not something done by one person alone and
it can exert its full effect only if it is incumbent upon all the agents engaged in the field. The
sociologically armed epistemological vigilance that each researcher can apply on his own behalf
can only be strengthened by the generalizing of the imperative of reflexivity and the spreading of
the indispensable instruments for complying with it; this alone can institute reflexivity as the
common law of the field, which would thus become characterized by a sociological critique of
all by all that would intensify the effects of the epistemological critique of all by all.59
Reflexivity is not simply a type of consciousness of an individual researcher, but rather a
collective practice of critique and inquiry amongst researchers to stave off objectifying in
practice the subject-object dichotomy.
Latour takes issue with 'classical sociologists' like Bourdieu and his directive for
reflexivity and says such sociologists believe that they are able to see things as they really are
and that they know more than their informants. However, one of Bourdieu's major concerns was
the social scientist not accounting for her or his own involvement in their study. This latter point
is addressed by Bourdieu's insistence on a reflexive sociology to account for the social scientists
themselves, something which Bourdieu believed lay people, for the most part, were ill-equipped
to do for themselves. Due to this belief, Latour characterized Bourdieu as a sort of elitist, one
whose role as a sociologist is to show or teach their subjects something about themselves they
are too ignorant to know without the sociologist's help. This point has been most scathingly
59

Pierre Bourdieu, Science of Science and Reflexivity (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004), 91.
23

argued by Hlne Mialet, an avid follower and proponent of Latour and ANT; she states in a
book review of Bourdieu's last book, titled The 'Righteous Wrath' of Pierre Bourdieu, that
instead of allowing things and beings the space they need to deploy their field of action and
their mutual self-definition, the sociologist (Bourdieu) performs an operation of reduction, by
relating the multiplicity of social (?) phenomena to underlying causes (like the systematic
reference to social systems or structures), or by relating agents to the determinations that are
supposed to make them act. This process of reduction implies that the sociologist has access to a
dimension of reality hidden from the eyes of the actors themselves.60 However, if it is true that
this is what Bourdieu's theory commits him to, it should be noted that this type of reduction is
different from a reduction to a more active structure of which the individual is simply a
manifestation of various structural components. Though the sociologist may be able to identify
things that their informants are not themselves aware of, this epistemological reduction is not an
ontological reduction. Bourdieu's approach was opposed to the more extreme theses of a certain
structuralism by refusing to reduce agents, which it considers to be eminently active and acting
(without necessarily doing so as subjects), to simple epiphenomena of structure (which exposes it
to seeming equally deficient to those who hold one position or the other).61 Nonetheless, this
difference is not enough to insulate Bourdieu, and other sociologists, from Latour's criticisms.
Latour states, Actors do the sociology for the sociologists and sociologists learn from the actors
what makes up their set of associations, but while this should seem obvious, such a result is
actually in opposition to the basic wisdom of critical sociologists.62 Latour accuses critical
sociologists of not listening to their informants, and, when they do, always translating the
chosen words of their informants into their academic language which has been made suitable for
60
61
62

Hlne Mialet, The 'Righteous Wrath' of Pierre Bourdieu, Social Studies of Science 33 (2003): 618.
Bourdieu, Practical Reason, viii.
Latour, Reassembling the Social, 32.
24

analytic manipulation. He scoffs that it seems that only sociologists of the socialespecially
critical sociologistscan manage to efficiently muffle their informants' precise vocabulary into
their own all-purpose meta-language.63 However, Latour has admitted to administering a similar
type of approach, most specifically in Politics of Nature. In an interview Latour described the
style of that book as Rousseauian, insofar as it took a position that if people only were thinking
differently, they would have a different life.64 Though he admits that this is a task of the
intellectual that they can never achieve, it nonetheless indicates that, if only for stylistic
purposes, Latour himself occupied a position he elsewhere criticized of the sociologist of the
social for occupying. When asked in the same interview, you do claim that what you're arguing
in terms of cosmopolitics has practical relevance for people who align themselves with political
ecology, in the sense that if they would only know better, if you like, to what their practices of
resistance against modernization were really about, it would give them a stronger political voice
in the future, Latour responded that yes, That's the style in which the book is written.65
Perhaps Latour can be forgiven insofar as he deploys different styles in different books, whereas
Bourdieu, perhaps, adhered with adamant conviction to a more or less single style, but one can
nonetheless see that Latour indulges in the same practices Bourdieu did despite criticisms of that
very approach.
Of particular note regarding Bourdieu's concern with reflexivity of researchers being
reflexive about how their location and actions in the field effect the field itself Latour seems
unabashedly unreflexive. In an interview with Robert Crease, Don Ihde, Casper Bruun Jensen,
and Evan Selinger, he admits at three separate occasions that he is unreflexive, admitting that

63
64
65

Ibid, 125.
Blok and Jensen, Bruno Latour: Hybrid Thoughts in a Hybrid World, 156.
Ibid, 155.
25

my degree of reflexivity on myself is nil,66 I am not very reflexive about my own work,67
and, apologetically, I am sorry to be so unreflexive on my own work.68 However, in the same
interview, which might speak to the reason for Latour's unreflexiveness, he states that I was
saved from philosophy of consciousness by early high doses of Nietzsche.69 Bourdieu, on the
other hand, is concerned with consciousness insofar as it is part of what makes up and is affected
by the structure of habitus. While Latour famously states, following one of his confessions about
being non-reflexive, I produce books, not a philosophy,70 there is reason to believe that he has
changed on this point, given his article Coming Out as a Philosopher71 and his most recent
endeavour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, wherein he
explains the seeming necessity to engage in philosophy.72 This is perhaps less of a resignation
than a well- or not so well-kept secret. He admits, I have never left the quest for philosophy,73
and concludes by saying, in a typical display of his finesse, wit, and humour, A last wish with
which to conclude: please, dont tell anyone, especially in the UK or the US, that such is my
overall life project and that I am, in effect, a philosopher worst of all a philosopher with a
system: they will never take me seriously again. Only under a German sky is one allowed to
think that big!74 Though engaging in philosophy is not necessarily akin to being reflexive, that,
in the above interview, Latour follows one of his confessions about being unreflexive75
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75

Chasing Technoscience, ed. Don Ihde & Evan Selinger. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). 19.
Ibid, 23.
Ibid, 26.
Ibid, 21.
Ibid, 19.
Bruno Latour, Coming out as a philosopher, Social Studies of Science 40 (2010): 599-608.
Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, 21-22.
Latour, Coming out as a philosopher, 600.
Ibid, 607.
Though Latour admits his unreflexivity, he nonetheless has engaged with a critique of reflexivity in Latour The
Politics of Explanation: an Alternative, in which he opens by saying Reflexivity is necessarily at the heart of
social studies of science because it is often argued that relativist sociologists are sawing the branch upon which
they sit. By making social explanations of the behaviour of natural sciences they make it impossible for their
own explanations to be seriously believed by anyone. Their arguments in feeding back on themselves nullify
their own claims (Ibid, 155).
26

immediately with a declaration that he writes books, and not philosophy, there is an obvious
rhetorical shift in his admission of awareness of his place in the modern (or not-so-modern)
world.76
This being said, it is interesting to consider particular unreflexive undercurrents described
by Tucker: Science Studies considers the theories and beliefs of scientists political rather than
direct reflections of an objective natural world. However, as 'first philosophy,' Science Studies
rarely apply the same approach to themselves, to understand themselves as political and
embedded in a social context.77 In response to Lorraine Daston,78 Dear and Jasanoff argue that
the distinction between the interdisciplinary STS and the disciplinary History of Science is one
which is productive and positive to both camps, and they mention Bourdieu, albeit
parenthetically, as being important to understanding the very nature of disciplinary differences,
including that of the sciences: Kaiser and Warwick, drawing, as noted, on Kuhn and Foucault
(one might also add Pierre Bourdieu), rightly argue that for the sciences themselves the
pedagogical component of a discipline is crucial.79 With the above considerations, we find both
homage as well as request for Bourdieusian tools or analysis to 'fill the gap' in the selfunderstanding of STS.

76

77

78
79

It should be noted that Bourdieu, too, spoke often of both his philosophical roots and his frequent ventures into
the realm of philosophy. Bourdieu stated, in Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action, You may wonder
why, being a sociologist, I should play the part of the philosopher. Partly, of course, it is in homage to my
philosopher friends who have convened here. But it is also because I am obliged to do so. To raise such
questions on the very nature of the scientific gaze is an integral part of scientific work. These questions have
been thrust upon me, outside of any intent or taste for pure speculation, in a number of research situations where
to understand my strategies or materials I was compelled to reflect upon the scholarly mode of knowledge
(Bourdieu, Practical Reason, 130). In addition, Bourdieu also authored an oft ignored book on Martin
Heidegger (Pierre Bourdieu, The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1991)).
Aviezer Tucker. The Political Theory of French Science Studies in Context, Perspectives on Science 15
(2007): 203.
Lorraine Daston, Science Studies and the History of Science. Critical Inquiry 35 (2009): 798-813.
Dear and Jasanoff. Dismantling Boundaries in Science and Technology Studies. 769.
27

6. Anglo/French
When reading Latours musings on and criticisms of what he calls the sociology of the
social, or of critical theory for that matter, Latour is directed by his context and experience in
France. Mialet, a former student of Latour's, states that Latour was fighting the French
epistemological tradition (as represented by Bachelard and Canguilhem), as well as fighting
French sociology (particularly, Bourdieu).80 He admits this: If one autonomizes discourse by
turning nature over to the epistemological and giving up society to the sociologists, one makes it
impossible to stitch these three resources back together.81 Though both Bourdieu and Latour
were highly influenced by the French intellectual milieu, they nonetheless trace quite different
traditions both within and outside of France. The conflict between the two likewise needs to be
read in a specifically French context. Didier Bigo has commented that despite Bourdieu and
Latour both responding and criticizing many of the same intellectual trends, French academia
politics tends to encourage these difficulties in recognizing similarities with other thinkers when
they deploy different terms. This has been especially unfortunate in understanding the emergence
of an alternative to the false dualism of structure and agency that both Bourdieu and Latour
advocate through a relational approach to practices.82 Indeed, despite much agreement on both
the problems and the type of solutions, the two thinkers represent, and indeed saw themselves as,
veritable opponents along strictly different paths. Tony Bennett notes that Bourdieu is clearly
the main target Latour has in mind in his generalized criticisms of sociology's claim to be able to
uncover the real motives of social actions in underlying structural causes which remain hidden
from, or only partially accessible to, social actors, and clarifies that Bourdieu's approach is
80

81
82

Hlne Mialet, Where would STS be without Latour? What would be missing?, Social Studies of Science 42
(2012): 458.
Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 64.
Didier Bigo, Pierre Bourdieu and International Relations: Power of Practices, Practices of Power,
International Political Sociology 5 (2011): 236, footnote 15.
28

within the framework of a realist epistemology in contrast to Latour's constructivism. 83 Didier

Bigo clarifies the similarities:
Like Bourdieu, they [Latour and Law] have all criticized the individualistic
approach and the rational choice theory that poses preconstituted identity of the
subject as evidence, as a given. They have also disagreed with the structuralist,
determinist, or holistic approaches associated with Durkheim or Althusserian
Marxism in which agents become puppets of historical laws they do not understand.
It is important to insist on this point.84
Likewise, Fuller described the two as trying to capture the same transformation from opposing
perspectives: Bourdieu, the director of the leading state-supported research institute in the social
sciences, critiquing the ways the state has buckled under external economic pressures; Latour,
the resident sociologist at a leading beneficiary of the emerging neoliberal order, denying that the
state ever had much control in the first place.85 Though Fuller's rhetoric may go a bit too far
here, it is worth nothing other methods of distancing that begin to more fully emerge when
Bourdieu and Latour are taken in context and not simply viewed through a theoretical lens.
Blok and Jensen contend that Latour is often mockingly ironic when it comes to
distancing himself from large parts of the sociological research establishment. He is particularly
derisive of the branch of sociology that is typically known as 'critical sociology,' as embodied by,
among others, Latour's slightly older and highly esteemed fellow countryman, Pierre
Bourdieu.86 They likewise acknowledge that Bourdieu serves as a kind of implicit scapegoat in
Latour's orchestration of his showdown with modernist patterns of thought.87 Bigo suggests that
83

84

85

86
87

Tony Bennett, Critical Trajectories: Culture, Society, Intellectuals (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 181,
n. 10.
All these authors, despite their differences, beyond the attacks to which they have been subjected in order to
normalize them in one camp or the other, are neither structuralists nor methodological individualists. They share
the double rejection of the false alternative of structure versus individual. This is why they propose a radically
different way to conceptualize politics. Bigo, Pierre Bourdieu and International Relations: Power of Practices,
Practices of Power, 236.
Steve Fuller, Why Science Studies Has Never Been Critical of Science: Some Recent Lessons on How to Be a
Helpful Nuisance and a Harmless Radical. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 30 (2000): 16.
Blok and Jensen, Bruno Latour: Hybrid Thoughts in a Hybrid World, 102.
Ibid.
29

it was not simply Latour who saw Bourdieu as advocating a misguided program; Bourdieu
likewise saw this of Latour. For Latour, Bourdieu is a structuralist, a Durkheimian or an
Althusserian, while for Bourdieu, Latour is a methodological individualist denying politics. Both
narratives are of bad faith.88 It would seem, then, that Latour's critique of Bourdieu is imminent
in Bourdieu's methodology, whereas Bourdieu's transcends Latour's metaphysics.
In addition to their French context, the appropriation of both thinkers outside of France
has been vast. A number of publications address the mis- or partial translation of both these
thinkers from the French to the North American contexts. For example, David L. Swartz argued
that while Bourdieu in Europe is thought of and used as a political theorist, in the North
American context Bourdieu's work has only been taken up in the sociology of culture and
education, as well as anthropology.89 Elsewhere, Swartz states that many of Bourdieus central
theoretical concerns remain somewhat elusive to much British and American sociology unless
they are understood in light of this [French] philosophical tradition90 of Bachelard, Canguilhem,
Koyr, Vuillemin, and Merleau-Ponty. Similarly, Deborah Reed-Danahay argues that Bourdieu's
work was to a large extent a form of autoethnography in the double sense of being selfreferential (referring back to his own origins and cultural preoccupations), and of constituting a
description and analysis of his own sociocultural milieu in France and its former colony in
Algeria.91 She also notes that, with respect to English speaking audiences, Bourdieu felt that
much of his work was misunderstood by readers, and he tried to clarify the meaning of his work
through several published interviews and essays.92 Indeed, we find such attempts to clarify and
88
89

90

91
92

Bigo, Pierre Bourdieu and International Relations: Power of Practices, Practices of Power, 236, fn. 15.
David L. Swartz, Pierre Bourdieu and North American Political Sociology: Why He Doesn't Fit In But
Should. French Politics. 4 (2006): 84-99.
David L. Swartz, Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1997), 31.
Deborah Reed-Danahay, Locating Bourdieu, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 4.
Ibid, 161.
30

correct misunderstandings by non-French audiences as in the following:

Another major cause of misunderstanding is arguably the fact that, as a rule, nonFrench interpreters of my work, both anthropological and sociological, have offered
a reading of it limited to its purely theoretical dimension. This has often led them to
ignore its properly empirical dimension, as well as the contribution that my research
brings to our knowledge of French society and, mutatis mutandis, of all modern
societies. This ignorance, paradoxically, does not preclude a number of my critics
from accusing me of limiting myself solely to the French case. In fact, as I have said
hundreds of times, I have always been immersed in empirical research projects, and
the theoretical instruments I was able to produce in the course of these endeavors
were intended not for theoretical commentary and exegesis, but to be put to use in
new research, be it mine or that of others. It is this comprehension through use that is
most rarely granted to me, especially abroad although more and more often I
receive works that, instead of endlessly repeating commentaries and somewhat
monotonous criticisms on habitus or some other concept of my making, are making
use of a modus operandi closely related to mine.93
Bourdieu also goes on to say that elsewhere, If you will allow me an image true to the spirit of
my theory of practice (and thus of scientific practice), I blame most of my readers for having
considered as theoretical treatises, meant solely to be read or commented upon, works that, like
gymnastics handbooks, were intended for exercise, or even better, for being put into practice;
that is, as books that put forth so many programs for work, observations, and experimentation.94
Identified here is a distinction worth considering in relation to Latour's criticisms. Though Latour
criticizes the theoretical backdrop of Bourdieu's theory about how to practice research, Latour
also criticizes the outcomes of the research. However, Bourdieu's insistence on reflexivity
insures that, at least in part, any theoretical (analytic) bifurcation are of a different type than any
which may come out at the end after application. Though a house may retain traces of the
hammer used to build it, the hammer is nonetheless not there after construction.
The relationship between Latour and Bourdieu can perhaps be understood in an anecdote
Bourdieu offers in Science of Science and Reflexivity. One can understand the Bourdieu-Latour
93
94

Bourdieu, Concluding Remarks: For a Sociogenetic Understanding of Intellectual Works, 270-271.

Ibid, 271.
31

relationship by way of a parallel relationship between the then younger and up-and-coming
Bourdieu with the older and established Robert Merton. Bourdieu states, It has appeared to me
retrospectively that I was somewhat unfair to Merton in my early writings in the sociology of
science no doubt under the effect of the position I then occupied, that of a newcomer in an
international field dominated by Merton and structural functionalism.95 In a section where he
critiques laboratory studies, Bourdieu reminds us that such studies, with some other writings
in similar view [have] been the source of a number of misreadings of my work which are very
widespread in the world of the sciences of science. He goes on to suggest that Latour and
Woolgar, amongst others, are part of a new sociology of science contributing to a dissolution
of his own sociology of science. Others have suggested that Latour was the new comer or
prophet and Bourdieu the priest, accounting for Latour's somewhat strawman engagement and
continual criticisms of Bourdieu. Bourdieu goes on to say in Science of Science and Reflexivity
that when one is youngthis is elementary sociology of scienceother things being equal, one
has less capital, and also less competence, and so, almost by definition, one is inclined to put
oneself forward in opposition to the established figures, and therefore to look critically at their
work. But this critique can in part be an effect of ignorance.96 Though he is speaking in the
context of his relation to Merton, we can also see this applying to Latour's relationship to
Bourdieu. In fact, this has been outright suggested by Willem Schinkel, who says that given the
differing positions of Latour, the young newcomer, and Bourdieu, the established academic, their
conflict would fit with the Bourdieusian picture of a (relatively) young scientist making a
distinction by means of challenging consecrated beliefs. What is at stake in such a struggle,
explains Schinkel, between a consecrated scientific star such as Bourdieu ('priest') after his
95

96

Bourdieu, Science of Science and Reflexivity, 12. Bourdieu also invokes Weber's contrast between prophets and
priests to describe his relationship with Merton, as well as uses the distinction frequently in his works.
Ibid, 13.
32

secession to the throne of the French scientific field (the chair of sociology at the College de
France, which he occupied since 1980) and a new vanguard headed by Latour ('prophet') is a
struggle over the legitimate classificatory schemes in which epistemological conflicts can in
fact be regarded as political conflicts.97 This tends to recapitulate Fullers two-church thesis of
STS.
Sal Restivo, often a critic of Latour,98 described him as, with the possible exception of
Thomas Kuhn, the most widely influential student of science and society of the last fifty years.99
Despite praise that Latour is a formidable social theorist, Restivo argues that this does not
automatically make his work sociological. His criticism of the sociologists of the social ignores
that fact that sociologists as different as George Lundberg [American], Nikolai Bukharin
[Russian], Howard Becker [American], and Randal Collins [American] have addressed the very
issues and problems Latour claims requires ANT.100 Though it may in fact be true that Latour
does not engage with these other social theorists,101 has the French context within which Latour
has worked in and from been taken into account? Restivo's response to Latour's Politics of
Nature suggests otherwise. For Restivo, Latour's elusiveness [as a scholar] is due in great part
to the increasingly philosophical voice he has adopted combined with the wider and wider scope
of the issues he has taken on. His philosophy, once unambiguously empirically grounded, has
97
98

99

100

101

Schinkel, Sociological discourse of the relational: the cases of Bourdieu & Latour, 722.
See Sal Restivo, Politics of Latour, Organization Environment 18 (2005): 111-115 or Sal Restivo, Red, Black,
and Objective: Science, Sociology, and Anarchism, (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2011), specifically his
chapter Sociology: A Copernican Revolution Changes How We Think About Science and Mathematics, 4372.
Sal Restivo, Bruno Latour: The Once and Future Philosopher. in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Major
Social Theorists, Vol. 2, 1st Ed. ed. George Ritzer, Jeffrey Stepnisky, (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2011),
520.
Sal Restivo, Red, Black, and Objective: Science, Sociology, and Anarchism. (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing,
2011), 70.
When asked within which discipline he locates himself, Latour responded, I think of myself as being a sort of
philosopher. I use ethnography as a means of doing philosophy. But officially I am a sociologist. I teach
sociology and will always teach sociology (Bruno Latour and Toms Snchez-Criado. Making the 'Res
Public'. Ephemera 7 (2007): 371).
33

moved onto a metaphysical plane divorced from the social and political realities of everyday life.
If he started his career with the promise of helping to fashion a Copernican revolution in the
sociology of science, he has evolved into a thinker who reminds us more of Rousseau or Hobbes.
This helps explain his ready dismissal of the perspectives and findings of the social sciences. His
plan for bringing the sciences into 'democracy' is more Platonic and transcendental than
empirical.102 As has already been attested by Aviezer Tucker, Politics of Nature reflects the
civic dislocation in France and the search for democratic alternatives to traditional technocratic
decision making.103 Though some of Restivo's criticisms may in fact be justified, ignoring the
French context considerably weakens his position and assessment of Latour.104
Tucker does a wonderful job of situating the French Science Studies founders, namely
Latour and Callon, in France and of responding to the very specific French institutional and
political context. Tucker explains that much of the political drive and considerations of Latour
are in direct response to the structure of the academy and its intimate relationship to the state,
arguing that the social and political structure of French science explains the emergence of the
descriptive and normative political theories associated with Science Studies.105 Tucker
concludes that The unitary and exclusionary character of the French technocratic elite has
favoured both its corruption and the emergence of the ideas of Science Studies,106 and proposes
that one read Science studies mostly as a critical theory of French politics and the monolithic
class hierarchy, especially in relation to the politics of science and technology and the peculiarly

102
103
104

105
106

Restivo, Bruno Latour: The Once and Future Philosopher, 70-71.

Tucker, The Political Theory of French Science Studies in Context, 208 (emphasis added)
These criticisms of Latour appear in Red, Black, and Objective: Science, Sociology, and Anarchism, published
in 2011, the same year as Restivo's chapter contribution on Latour to The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Major
Social Theorists, Vol. 2, entitled Bruno Latour: The Once and Future Philosopher, which did justly labour to
situate Latour in France by way of his biography.
Tucker, The Political Theory of French Science Studies in Context, 203.
Ibid, 218-219,
34

French inbred symbiosis between scientists, engineers, managers, and bureaucrats.107 Latour and
Geof Bowker also have written about the peculiarity of the French academic environment and
how it differs from that of British or American environments, focusing specifically on the
various disciplines involved with the study of science. At one point they invoke the words of
Michael Pollack to make their case, where he described the difference between Anglo-Saxon and
French traditions of studying science as being due to the fact that they divide the world up
differently.108 Latour and Bowker take the differences between Anglo-Saxon and French
contexts seriously, noting that Anglo-Saxons always miss the dispersed nature of French
intellectual life, and the unique opportunity therein of developing in relative isolation works that
are incommensurable with one another,109 and go on to say that between the Anglo-Saxon and
French traditions stands accusations from both sides that neither are doing 'social studies of
science' in the proper way.110 Latour took certain differences between the American and French
divide seriously enough to use a pseudonym, Jim Johnson, to publish a paper in an Anglo
journal. Latour states in a footnote to that paper, The reason for this use of pseudonym was the
opinion of the editors that no American sociologist is willing to read things that refer to specific
places and times which are not American. Thus I inscribed in my text American scenes so as to
decrease the gap between the prescribed reader and the pre-inscribed one.111 Wacquant echoes a
similar concern, specifically regarding Bourdieu's introduction to America, cautioning that
American intellectual myopia functions in a fashion opposite to that of smaller national
sociologies, such as Scandinavian or Dutch sociology; for whereas the latter cannot ignore
107
108

109
110
111

Ibid, 219.
Geof Bowker and Bruno Latour. A Booming Discipline Short of Discipline: (Social) Studies of Science in
France, Social Studies of Science 17 (1987): 721.
Ibid.
Ibid, 726.
Jim Johnson (Bruno Latour). Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together: The Sociology of a Door-Closer,
Social Problems 35, Special Issue: The Sociology of Science and Technology (1988): 304, footnote 2.
35

American Social Sciences and can even be blinded by it to the point where they cannot see
themselves, U.S. Sociology typically experiences difficulty seeing others due to its propensity to
project itself everywhere it looks.112 In terms of the degradation of fidelity across the Atlantic,
both Latour and Bourdieu, and their respective camps, are in agreement.
A question worth considering is whether it was simply Bourdieu's theoretical
methodology that Latour disliked, or was it also the way Bourdieu was appropriated and used by
others? For example, in On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, Latour takes a quick jab at
Bourdieu, as he often does: You can now have your Baudrillard's or your Bourdieu's disillusion
for a song, your Derridian deconstruction for a nickel. Conspiracy theory costs nothing to
produce; disbelief is easy, debunking is what is learned in 101 classes in critical theory.113 This
pithy remark seems to show Latour's frustration with how these thinkers methods are being used
rather than what they are. Indeed, in Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of
Fact to Matters of Concern, Latour's first named target is Bourdieu, but here he elaborates on
what seems to be his main objection, namely, how his work is being used:
Let me be mean for a second. What's the real difference between conspiracists and a
popularized, that is a teachable version of social critique inspired by a too quick
reading of, let's say, a sociologist as eminent as Pierre Bourdieu?... Of course
conspiracy theories are an absurd deformation of our own arguments, but, like
weapons smuggled through a fuzzy border to the wrong party, these are our weapons
nonetheless. In spite of all the deformations, it is easy to recognize, still burnt in the
steel, our trademark.114
Latour has specific criticisms of Bourdieu and Reflexive Sociology and Theory of Practice,
as well of questionable appropriation, administration, and use of Bourdieu's work.

112

113
114

Loc J. D. Wacquant, Bourdieu in America: Notes on the Transatlantic Importation of Social Theory, in
Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives, ed. Craig Calhoun, Edward LiPuma, and Moishe Postone (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1993), 251, fn. 22.
Bruno Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 82.
Bruno Latour, Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern, Critical
Inquiry 30 (2004): 230. (emphasis added.)
36

This last point should not be passed over too quickly, as it remains strewn throughout
Latour's corpus. In Latour and Emilie Hermant's Paris: Invisible City, a type of diorama
travelogue in search of the entity referred to as Paris, Latour includes the following lengthy
indictment of, among others, Bourdieu for having become too easily appropriated:
Just as the computers that in the fifties cost millions of dollars and filled immense
rooms with empty tubes are now being reduced to minute electronic chips that hardly
cost more than the sand from which they're made, so too the critical mind has been
miniaturized and the drop in its prices is following Moore's famous law: the Walter
Benjamin now measures no more than two millimeters, one can buy a Guy Debord
anti-virus for next to nothing, plug in a Roland Barthes in one go, install a Bourdieu
self-diagnosis module with a single cut-and-paste, and as for a Baudrillard, it's
available in free share The critical mind requires no more effort; doubting
everything is as easy as doing a ten-digit division on a pocket calculator.
We now understand why critique, whether high-brow or popular, cumbersome or
miniaturized, costly or cheap, brave or facile, sees nothing but lies everywhere. It
still longs for a full, wholesome reality and finds only strands, paths or channels that
it doesn't know how to follow, objects that it can't see how to fathom, stumbling at
each step on the same abysmal distance between words and things, past and present,
constant and fickle, objective and subjective, and that, without a vehicle enabling it
to go step by step, it never manages to cross.115
A tendentious critique of critique, is this the fault of Bourdieu (and others mentioned) or is it the
fault of those who have read Bourdieu and turned his tools into a series of 'double-click'116
talking points? Though Latour does indict Bourdieu and the others in the end, he also
distinguishes between, on the one side, the high-brow, cumbersome, costly, and brave
supposedly the authors themselves and the scholars who labour to understand them and the
popular, miniaturized, cheap, and facile those who have either read the authors lazily or
familiarized themselves with the authors' terminology enough to turn it into pop-jargon. But
115

116

Bruno Latour and Emile Hermant, Paris ville invisible (Paris: La Dcouverte-Les Empcheurs de spense en
rond, 1998), English translation http://www.bruno-latour.fr/virtual/PARIS-INVISIBLE-GB.pdf (accessed
8/12/2014), p. 94-95.
On Latours critique of critique, see Stephen Petrina, The New Critiquette and Old Scholactivism: On
Academic Manners, Managers, Matters, and Freedom. Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor 20 (2012):
17-63. In the late 1990s, Latour developed the term 'double-click' to refer to shortcuts taken which presuppose a
network which nonetheless remains uninvestigated, thus remaining 'black boxed'.
37

might STS have missed this point? Might the conflict between Bourdieu and Latour have been
overinflated by Latour's exaggerations, leading to a premature or ungrounded ostracism of
Bourdieu?
It should be noted that Bourdieu himself was also frustrated with a similar state of
popular or lazy sociology when he began, which is part of the reason he branded his own
sociology. Bourdieu's efforts during the 1960s and 1970s focused on developing a critical social
scientific research orientation as distinct from the academic sociology taught in the universities
and the media-oriented pop sociology that flourished in French intellectual circles. To these
ends, he wanted to transform sociology into a rigorous research enterprise that would be critical
though not prophetic, theoretical though empirically researchable, and scientific though not
positivist, which were not to take marching orders from political parties or interest groups.117
However, he did feel that though sociology should be mindful of its direct or indirect patrons, the
intellectuals themselves were not free from imperative political participation. Bourdieu's method
of reflexivity was in part to maintain this very divide, such that the scholar does not import the
logic of political struggle into the scientific arena yet is able to produce symbolic effects that can
shape political life.118 In any case, Bourdieu's entrance into sociology was greatly provoked by
his hopes and aspirations to distance the popularization of sociology, much in the same way that
Latour felt about the popularization of Bourdieu's work.
Latour is aware of the potential for Anglo readers to misunderstand him, and he attributes
this, at least in part, to differing philosophical traditions. Latour expounds in an interview,
There is a literary element, of course, in it for me, but I always stop the exercise at writing well
117

118

David L. Swartz, From Critical Sociology to Public Intellectual: Pierre Bourdieu and Politics, Theory and
Society 32, Special Issue on The Sociology of Symbolic Power: A Special Issue in Memory of Pierre Bourdieu
(2003): 796.
Ibid, 819-820, fn. 22.
38

 it is not about writing beautifully. It is very amusing, because it seems to be so obvious, but my
Anglo-Saxon colleagues in science studies miss the semiotic point.119 To them, the fact that
writing is a medium is absolutely invisible.... I think this feel for the materiality of writing is a
completely Continental thing. For others, ideas are floating around.... It is ridiculous I mean,
everything in a book is an embodied intervention on a specific topic; it is a completely precise
question. I feel responsible for what I have written if it is taken as writing.120 Latour admits that
his various works are done in a very French way; we were trained to say, like Rousseau:
'Laissons de ct tous les faits!' let's leave aside all the facts for a while. It is not the way you
are trained, if you are trained in Cambridge [England] or in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or
whatever. I have a sort of weakness for this procedure, but you need specific conditions; you
need to be not in a position of power, but a position of weakness which we are in science
studies and you need to know that it is just a writing device.121 Perhaps this latter point has
gone completely unacknowledged by the Anglo world, and too much of Latour's apparent
destruction of Bourdieu was taken as a fact and not as part of a rhetorical tool to explicate his
position. This is not to take away from the criticisms laid at Bourdieu's feet, but it does suggest
that the interpretation of Latour's defeat of Bourdieu has been overplayed and misunderstood.
Latour goes on to state that he did not wish to 'dismiss' sociology, but rather to elicit
something which is the fact that sociology, at least in France, has a much too close too much
of a role in the institutional work of the Republic. That's clear with Durkheim, but it is true all
the way to Bourdieu anyway. When asked in an interview to describe his engagement with
sociology in Reassembling the Social, the text taken as Latour's most ruthless critique of
119

120
121

Earlier in the same interview Latour details four points on writing: It is a semiotic, plus an actor-network, plus
an ethical, plus a sociology of science point (Blok and Jensen, Bruno Latour: Hybrid Thoughts in a Hybrid
World, 162).
Blok and Jensen, Bruno Latour: Hybrid Thoughts in a Hybrid World, 164.
Ibid, 161.
39

Bourdieu, Latour responded, admitting

Ignorance. First of all ignorance. I'm too ignorant in sociology. It is not a fight, it is...
I'm sneaking in at a party where there are already masses of people who are much
more involved and interested. I'm just sneaking in and being mean because I want to
develop one argument, which is completely orthogonal to sociology; which is
connected to this obsession with non-humans and controversy. So, the reason I did
this argument against sociology was to make the thing clearer, and one way of being
clear is to be mean. But I'm not too proud of that, I have to say, because first, it is
very unfair to the many sociologists who are doing something entirely different.
However, he goes on, Again, it is a book; every book has its own strategy of writing.122 These
considerations should, at the very least, give pause to the presumed devastating blow Latour
dealt to Bourdieu and how it has been interpreted.
For both Bourdieu and Latour, despite their popularity in the Anglo-speaking world, the
theoretical backdrop of both is somewhat opaque to that very same audience. Given the absence
of familiarity with their philosophical influences before their adoption, there exists a lag of
attuned interpretation. Bourdieu's most well-known disciple, Loc J. D. Wacquant, with whom he
authored many books and articles, has written in a number of places on the reception of Bourdieu
in America. In Bourdieu in America: Notes on the Transatlantic Importation of Social Theory,
Wacquant provides many scathing assessments of Bourdieu's appropriation into the Anglospeaking world, describing his chapter as a contribution to the sociology of intellectual relations
between France and the United States, in the perhaps immodest hope of helping to move
them beyond what one scholar once called the twin attitudes of 'blind adulation' and 'Yankee
yahooism'.123 He goes on to say, which may illuminate Latour in the American context as well,
that One major difference between the sending and the receiving intellectual universes in this
respect is that the borders between sociology, anthropology, history, and philosophy are notably

122
123

Ibid, 160.
Wacquant, Bourdieu in America: Notes on the Transatlantic Importation of Social Theory, 236-237.
40

more difficult to cross in the United States.124 Wacquant states that the moral of the story
regarding the exportation of Bourdieu is that intellectual products such as social theories should,
whenever possible, be exported with as much of their native 'context' as possible ..., and
imported with full awareness of the distortions induced by the mediating interest of, affinities
with, and biases built into the objective relations between producer, intermediary, and
consumer.125 Blok and Jensen have likewise detailed three types of readers of Latour in an
attempt to situate Latour's various interpretations. The first are researchers and practitioners
with a stated interest in STS, while the second is composed of philosophers and historians of
ideas.126 They also explain a subgroup, namely sociologists, who read, they claim, Latour
mainly as a philosopher of science (due in part from the criticisms of and from Bourdieu).127 To
emphasize, Bourdieu's reception in the Anglophone world was accompanied by an absence of
exposure to Bourdieu's intellectual predecessors. Has Latour's criticisms of not only Bourdieu
but also of critical theory and the Frankfurt School been too readily accepted given the hitherto
opacity of Latour's own philosophical genealogy?128
Given Bourdieu's seniority, there has been a sufficient amount of time that allowed for his
predecessors to gain exposure and assessment in the Anglophone world. Similarly, despite
Latours popularity and stature in STS, those who informed many of his methodological and
philosophical approaches remain marginal at best to the STS community. For example, in The
Materiality of Things? Bruno Latour, Charles Pguy and The History of Science, Henning
Schmidgen provides an informative glimpse into the early intellectual life of Latour which is
124
125
126
127

128

Ibid, 241.
Ibid, 247.
Blok and Jensen, Bruno Latour: Hybrid Thoughts in a Hybrid World, 22.
Blok and Jensen themselves share backgrounds in sociology and anthropology and are likewise attempting to
make a space for both authors and traditions. They lament in a footnote that in the Danish context with which
they are most familiar, though this would be a familiar tale, it would be reasonable to say that the sociological
reception of Latour is virtually non-existent. Ibid, 182, fn. 20.
Petrina, The New Critiquette.
41

necessary for understanding the often ignored theological aspects of some of Latour's works.
Latour's 1975 doctoral thesis was Exegesis and Ontology with Respect to the Resurrection,
written under the supervision of Claude Bruaire, widely considered a 'theological philosopher'
and a Christian rationalist'.129 Latour describes himself as having been trained in philosophy
and biblical exegesis.130 Early in his career, he lectured and then published on Charles Pguy's
Clio: Dialogue between History and the Pagan Soul, providing a structuralist reading ... making
comparison with the textual structure of the New Testament gospels.131 These brief remarks
suggest another blind-spot inherent in Anglo scholarship on Latour, given that the exposure of
thinkers such as Pguy,132 Tarde, Deleuze, and Serres have not been part of the common
intellectual milieu.
Despite Bourdieu's notion of 'field', various forms of 'capital', 'habitus', and analyses of
speech acts and the rights of naming which have been influential to the social study of scientific
knowledge production, he remains but a distant and archaic figure in the STS literature and
departments yet remains a prominent figure in Sociology. Latour's criticisms seem to have kept
Bourdieu out of STS departments as well as himself out of Sociology departments for those same
criticisms. Though Latour's criticisms of Reflexive Sociology may have some weight within
the French context and beyond, the adoption and translation of both Latour and Bourdieu into the
contemporary North American context may not in fact retain as much conflict.133 What has and
129

130
131
132

133

Henning Schmidgen, The Materiality of Things? Bruno Latour, Charles Pguy and the History of Science,
History of the Human Sciences 26 (2012): 5.
Ibid, 6.
Ibid.
Though Pguy's mentor and friend Henri Bergson is known and has been widely translated, thus far most of
Pguy's work has yet to be translated into English.
This line of inquiry is partially provoked by consideration of Louis Hartz's fragments theory, which Hartz
uses to account for the ideological stagnation of colonized countries in comparison to the originating colonizing
countries whose ideologies continue to change. For example, Hartz sees each case of colonization through
settlement as a process of fragmentation, as a separation of a colonial part from the European whole, as an
isolation of a specific slice or portion of European society endowed with particular ideological characteristics
and tendencies. In the New World setting, these parts or fragments of the original European ideological
spectrum become totalities, wholes, absolutes, universes in their own right. Rigidity and traditionalism set in.
42

has not translated well across the Atlantic has been irregular, but this irregularity may not be
entirely negative. Hitherto, Latour's criticisms of Bourdieu have translated fairly well, though
much of the historical context, stylistic considerations, and rhetorical nuances have not. Perhaps
when the receiving country acts in a manner of a prism that selects and refracts external stimuli
according to its own configuration,134 there are new possibilities for reconciliation after the
distortions than would be present with the context holding the original conflict intact. Given this
situation, in becoming aware of or correcting for some of the irregularities, is the distance Latour
created between STS and Bourdieu narrowed?

134

There is a strong tendency to a hardening or fixity of fragment values because the basic enemies have been
left behind in Europe and the battles won by default (K. D. McRae, Louis Hartz's Concept of the Fragment
Society and its Application to Canada, Canadian Studies 5 (1978): 19). I bring this up simply to gesture at the
room for further research into the relationship between these two thinkers both on their home turf and in their
appropriated contexts, and whether or not the problematics are the same in each context.
Wacquant, Bourdieu in America: Notes on the Transatlantic Importation of Social Theory, 247.
43

7. Conclusion
The appraisal of Bourdieu's prolific work with respect to STS has been judged
disproportionately based upon Latour's multiple occasions of criticism and Bourdieu's single text
on STS discourses and issues. In light of considerations mentioned above, the inclusion of
Bourdieus work with respect to STS necessitates a reassessment of his potential usefulness to
the discipline. That being said, some have continued to develop Bourdieus sociology of science
and scientific knowledge,135 and Schinkel claimed that even a radical heretic such as Latour can
be quite easily accounted for in Bourdieus analysis.136 In addition, Blok and Jensen state the
following in a footnote: In light of Latour's later controversies with Bourdieu, it is somewhat
ironic to note that Latour and Woolgar actually borrow the concept of the cycles of credit from
Bourdieu.137 Might there be more?
Although Latour's latest book has been described as developing a research protocol
different from the actor-network theory with which his name is now associated,138 ANT has
been hugely influential and foundational to STS. I take up the point of Jonathan Sterne and Joan
Leach: Yes, it is true that one cannot know in advance the workings of power in any given
situation, but Actor-Network Theory offers no path back into social analysis, into questions of
domination, exclusion, resistance and transformation the stuff of politics once its work of
mapping is done.139 One must remember that, for Latour, in most situations the sociology of
the social will be adequate, because society only changes at a slow place. But, when things
change rapidly, such as during controversies, such static concepts fall short, and sociology
135

136
137
138

139

For example, Kyung-Man Kim, What Would a Bourdieuan Sociology of Scientific Truth Look Like? Social
Science Information 48 (2009): 57-79.
Schinkel, Sociological Discourse of the Relational: The Cases of Bourdieu & Latour, 723.
Blok and Jensen, Bruno Latour: Hybrid Thoughts in a Hybrid World, 181, fn. 4.
From the Harvard University Press website description of An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology
of the Moderns, [http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674724990], last accessed on 3/14/2014.
Jonathan Sterne and Joan Leach, The Point of Social Construction and the Purpose of Social Critique, Social
Epistemology 19 (2005): 192.
44

stands in need of sociology of associations.140 Save for the fissure over Kant, this may in fact
account for a different way of understanding the differences between Bourdieu and Latour: the
turbulence of the subject of their interest. Because Latour is most interested in controversies,
when metaphysical and ontological negotiations are at their highest, it is not surprising that
Bourdieu's sociology would be found inadequate. But as Latour indicates, in situations of relative
stability, Bourdieu would suffice. Given that ANT offers little to account for how networks are
reproduced over time, Bourdieus social and cultural reproduction are quite helpful in
understanding this temporal continuity or stability.
Latours and Bourdieu's different methodological ends can be identified in the etymology
of these ends. Analysis comes from the Latin ana-luein meaning up and loosen, while
description or describere means to write down. The directions of these two are telling: Latour
sees Bourdieu as providing meta-language that transcends and translates the speech of his
informants into explanatory language. In an essay on Serres, Latour praises his refusal to use
meta-language while criticizing 'critical' philosophers (extended to sociologists), stating,
'Critical' philosophers firmly install their metalanguage in the centre and slowly substitute their
arguments to every single object of periphery, while Serres' pre-critical philosophy has no
centre and no substitution of one metalanguage that would overmaster others, a discourse which
is not beyond or above or below141 but rather is inside. Latour maintains a similar posture by
following, down and amongst the actors he is investigating. A Bourdieusian analysis wont do
here because one has to trace the network, as Latour often reminds us, which is traceable only
when it's being modified.142 But again, we see here that if there is no crisis, if there is no
controversy, then Latour, by his own admission, has little, if not nothing, to add.
140
141

142

Blok and Jensen, Bruno Latour: Hybrid Thoughts in a Hybrid World, 107.
Bruno Latour, The Enlightenment Without the Critique: A Word on Michel Serres' Philosophy, in
Contemporary French Philosophy, ed. A. Phillips Griffiths (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987): 96.
Latour, Reassembling the Social, 160.
45

It is worth reconsidering if Latour's early criticisms of Bourdieu have maintained their

apparent devastating blow. Though Latour no doubt still takes issue with Bourdieu and the entire
sociological tradition from which Bourdieu derives, one should consider if remaining dedicated
to the criticisms of the STS patriarch is desirable. After all, the other 'fathers' of ANT and STS,
Michel Callon and John Law, rarely mention, let alone spend any length of time criticizing,
Bourdieu.143 Dear and Jasanoff concluded that Invoking tendentious disciplinary distinctions to
exclude any of those [methodological] concerns from a purified 'discipline' does no one any good
neither the cause of scholarship nor the wider public goods of information and criticism that
universities aim to serve.144 It may be said that Bourdieu did not abide by Latour's principle of
symmetry, but neither did Latour abide by Bourdieu's principle of reflexivity (though, perhaps,
this is changing). Latour has said he is a bricoleur and that his philosophy is a bricolage, while
Bourdieu's philosophy has been described as eclectic.145 Though these terms are used in general,
it is worth asking: to what extent is there a difference? Though this point may be nominal at best,
since both were practitioners of assorted methodologies, to what extent would sampling from
both result in a greater set of tools which retain many of the virtues of both in order to deal with
both the rapid and more regular movements of the social? The differences between Bourdieu and
Latour are by no means minor,146 and the distinctions are most useful when the purpose of such
143

144
145

146

In common texts of Law and Callon, Law is the only one to mention Bourdieu (6 times in Organizing
Modernity: Social Ordering and Social Theory, and twice in Actor Network Theory and After).
Dear and Jasanoff. Dismantling Boundaries in Science and Technology Studies. 774.
For example, this word is explicitly used to describe Bourdieu's philosophy or method in Pekka Sulkunen.
Society Made Visible: On the Cultural Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. Acta Sociologica, 25 (1982): 114.;
Michle Lamont, How Has Bourdieu Been Good to Think With? The Case of the United States. Sociological
Forum 27 (March 2012): 231; Pierre Bourdieu and Literacy Education, ed. James Albright, Allan Luke. New
York: Routledge, 2008, 13; Social Theory and Education: A Critique of Theories of Social and Cultural
Reproduction, ed. Raymond Allen Morrow, Carlos Alberto Torres. Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1995, 178, 333.; Jen Webb, Tony Schirato, and Geoff Danaher. Understanding Bourdieu. London: Sage
Publications, 2002, 2, 4.
A potential locale of convergence between the two may in fact be Bourdieu's notion of habitus. Though it is
much too anthropocentric for Latour, there are striking similarities between Bourdieu's habitus and the use of
milieu by Simondon (whom Latour considers, rather than Heidegger, the 'true' first philosopher of technology).
There thus far has been no literature on this possible relationship, and much of Simondon's work has yet to be
translated into the English-speaking world and intellectual sphere.
46

focus is to understand the distinctions. In STS, the two are as yet by no means compatible,
although Sergio Sismondo has alluded to the opportunity for Bourdieusian theorizing to
articulate science as a set of material practices, and its habituses as simultaneously human and
non-human domains.147
What is necessary is not some multiperspectival approach, where from different angles
one sees different aspects of the same thing. No doubt what one sees is different depending on
where one is looking or focused: down and near (Latour) or up and far (Bourdieu). Rather, the
image I hope to portray is one of Bourdieu the Gatherer and Latour the Tracer. They manipulate
their subjects differently: Bourdieu by grouping and arranging for analysis, Latour by tracing
paths for description. The difference is, to analogize, that with Bourdieu we are provided with a
map, albeit limited in its familiarity with the minute details of the regions, whereas with Latour
we are provided with a detailed story of an excursion, but in a manner that makes it difficult to
use again when taking a different path or undertaking a new excursion. Both are informative. But
if this analogy seems a bit too strong, one should recall that Latour says with the sociology of
associations, the aim is to 'follow the actors themselves' as they restructure the heterogeneous
collective. The logical implications of such an exclusive focus on restructurings is that, whenever
a situation entails no movement and no change in social configurations, the sociology of
associations in contrast to the sociology of the social will have nothing whatsoever to say.148
In such a situation, Latour states, No trace left, thus no information, thus no description, then no
talk. Don't fill it in.149 However, there is still work that can be done, work that Bourdieu allows
us to do. In the snapshots that these tools allow, we are able to see, in a sense, initial and final
stages on either side of the controversy. Though it may be provisional, a Bourdieusian analysis
147
148
149

Sismondo, Bourdieu's Rationalist Science of Science: Some Promises and Limitations, 94.
Blok and Jensen, Bruno Latour: Hybrid Thoughts in a Hybrid World, 107.
Latour, Reassembling the Social, 150.
47

of the pre- and post-controversy would provide researchers/scholars with a list of actors before
they have completely familiarized themselves with the dynamics of the controversy underway.
Blok and Jensen elaborate: The aim is to follow techno-scientific actors in all aspects of their
attempts to create alliances, no matter which types of materials, artifacts, or actors may become
involved in the process.... The main task of the sociologist of associations is to follow, to the best
of his or her abilities, the many trajectories and detours taken by the actors.150 Latour doesn't,
and can't, tell us how to choose which actors to follow, but rather states that the only viable
slogan is to 'follow the actors themselves'; yes, one must follow them when they multiply entities
and again when they rarefy entities.151 Blok and Jensen explain that Latour argues that
researchers of science and technology must develop a cleverness and broadness of repertoire that
can match the actors they study,152 but this is not particularly helpful for scholars beginning
their study and who have not yet been acquainted with the litany of actors it is possible follow.
Doing a Bourdieusian analysis before a Latourian description might provide the researcher with
a veritable map and legend to identify ahead of time which paths (actors) one should follow.
Supplementing Latours description with Bourdieus explanatory analysis of initial and final
stages of a controversy may provide researchers with the ability to anticipate alliances between
actors that develop from pre- to post-controversy. With map and story in hand, we may finally be
able to navigate around the differences between Bourdieu and Latour to a place where Low and
High Church are brought into negotiation without necessitating either a conversion to or an
excommunication from STS.

150
151
152

Blok and Jensen, Bruno Latour: Hybrid Thoughts in a Hybrid World, 39.
Latour, Reassembling the Social, 227
Blok and Jensen, Bruno Latour: Hybrid Thoughts in a Hybrid World, 39.
48

Bibliography
Edited Volumes
A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination, ed. John Law, London:
Routledge, 1991
Beyond the Science Wars: The Missing Discourse about science and society, ed. Ullica
Segerstrale. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000.
Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives, ed. Craig Calhoun, Edward LiPuma, Moishe Postone, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Chasing Technoscience, ed. Don Ihde & Evan Selinger. Indiana University Press, 2000.
Contemporary French Philosophy, ed. A. Phillips Griffiths, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1987
Cultural Analysis and Bourdieu's Legacy: Settling Accounts and Developing Alternatives. New
York: Routledge, 2010.
Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, ed. Sheila Jasanoff, Gerald E. Markle, James C.
Petersen, Trevor Pinch, Sage Publications, 1995.
Key Sociological Thinkers, 2nd ed., ed. Rob Stones. New York: Palgrave Macmillan London,
2008.
Knowledge and Reflexivity, New Frontiers in the Sociology of Science, ed Steve Woolgar,
London: Sage Publications, 1988.
Pierre Bourdieu and Literacy Education, ed. James Albright, Allan Luke. New York: Routledge,
2008.
Pierre Bourdieu: Key Concepts, 2nd ed, ed. Michael Grenfell, Durham: Acumen Publishing,
2012.
Science, technology, and society: a cross-disciplinary perspective, ed. Ina Spiegel-Rsing, Derek
John de Solla Price, Sage Publications, 1977.
Social Studies of Science and Technology: Looking Back, Ahead. Sociology of the Sciences
Yearbook, Vol. 23, ed. Bernward Joerges, Helga Nowotny. Dordrecht: Kluwer
Academic Publishers, 2003
Social Theory and Education: A Critique of Theories of Social and Cultural Reproduction, ed.
Raymond Allen Morrow, Carlos Alberto Torres. Albany: State University of New York

49

Press, 1995.
The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, 3rd edition, ed. Edward J. Hackett, Olga
Amsterdamska, Michael E. Lynch, Judy Wajcman, Wiebe E. Bijker, MIT Press, 2007.
The Science Studies Reader, ed. Mario Biagioli. New York: Routledge, 1999.
The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists, Vol. 2, 1st Ed. ed. George Ritzer,
Jeffrey Stepnisky, Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2011.

Books/Articles/Chapters
Albert, Mathei; Kleinman, Daniel Lee. Bringing Pierre Bourdieu to Science and Technology
Studies. Minerva (September 2011): 263-273.
Allchin, Douglas. Pseudohistory and Pseudoscience. Science & Education 13 (2004)
Allwood, Carl Martin, Jan Barmark, and Steve Fuller. A Conversation with Steve Fuller.
Configurations 8 (Fall 2000): 389-417.
Barron, Colin, Bruno Latour, and Steve Fuller. A Strong Distinction between Humans and NonHumans is No Longer Required for Research Purposes: A Debate Between Bruno Latour
and Steve Fuller, History of the Human Sciences 16 (2003): 77-99.
Bennett, Tony. Critical Trajectories: Culture, Society, Intellectuals, Malden: Blackwell
Publishing, 2007.
Bigo, Didier. Pierre Bourdieu and International Relations: Power of Practices, Practices of
Power, International Political Sociology 5 (2011): 225-258.
Blok, Anders, Torben Elgaard Jensen, Bruno Latour: Hybrid Thoughts in a Hybrid World, New
York: Routledge, 2011.
Bowker, Geof, Bruno Latour. A Booming Discipline Short of Discipline: (Social) Studies of
Science in France, Social Studies of Science 17 (1987): 715-748.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Concluding Remarks: For a Sociogenetic Understanding of Intellectual
Works, in Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives, ed. Craig Calhoun, Edward LiPuma, and
Moishe Postone, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, 263-275
. Distinctions: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1984.
. Language and Symbolic Power, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991.

50

 . Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
. Pascalian Meditations, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.
. Science of Science and Reflexivity, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
. Social Space and Symbolic Power, Sociological Theory 7 (1989): 14-25.
. The Logic of Practice, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992.
. The Peculiar History of Scientific Reason, Sociological Forum 6 (1991): 3-26.
. The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991.
. The Social Space and the Genesis of Groups. Theory and Society 4 (1985): 723-744.
. Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Bourdieu, Pierre, Loc Wacquant. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2005.
Brubaker, Rogers. Rethinking Classical Theory: The Sociological Vision of Pierre Bourdieu,
Theory and Society 14 (1985): 745-775.
Buzelin, Hlne. Unexpected Allies: How Latour's Network Theory Could Complement
Bourdieusian Analyses in Translation Studies. The Translator: Special Issue. Bourdieu
and the Sociology of Translation and Interpreting 11 (2005): 193-218.
Camic, Charles. Bourdieu's Cleft Sociology of Science, Minerva 49 (2011): 275-293.
Daston, Lorraine. Science Studies and the History of Science. Critical Inquiry 35 (2009): 798813.
Dear, Peter, Sheila Jasanoff. Dismantling Boundaries in Science and Technology Studies. Isis
101 (2010): 759-774.
Fuller, Steve. Science Studies through the Looking Glass: An Intellectual Itinerary, in Beyond
the Science Wars: The Missing Discourse about science and society, ed. Ullica
Segerstrale. Albany: State University of New York Press (2000): 185-218.
. Why Science Studies Has Never Been Critical of Science: Some Recent Lessons on How to
Be a Helpful Nuisance and a Harmless Radical. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 30
(2000): 5-32.
Guggenheim, Michael, Jrg Potthast. Symmetrical twins: On the relationship between Actor-

51

Network theory and the sociology of critical capacities, European Journal of Social
Theory 15 (2011): 157-178.
Guggenheim, Michael, Helga Nowotny, Joy in Repetition Makes the Future Disappear: A
Critical Assessment of the Present State of STS, in Social Studies of Science and
Technology: Looking Back, Ahead. Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook, Vol. 23, ed.
Bernward Joerges, Helga Nowotny. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003,
229-260.
Hekkanen, Raila. Fields, Networks and Finnish prose: A Comparison of Bourdieusian Field
Theory and Ator-Network Theory in Translation Sociology. CETRA Research Seminar
in Translation Studies 2008
Inghilleri, Moira. The Sociology of Bourdieu and the Construction of the 'Object' in Translation
and Interpreting Studies. The Translator 11 (2005): 125-145.
Johnson, Jim (Bruno Latour). Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together: The Sociology of a
Door-Closer, Social Problems, Special Issue: The Sociology of Science and Technology
35 (1988): 298-310.
Kim, Kyung-Man. What would a Bourdieuan sociology of scientific truth look like? Social
Science Information 48 (2009): 57-79.
Lamont, Michle. How Has Bourdieu Been Good to Think With? The Case of the United
States. Sociological Forum 27 (March 2012): 228-237.
Latour, Bruno. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns,
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013.
. Coming out as a philosopher, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 40, No 4 (2010): 599-608.
. On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.
. Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1999.
. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007.
. Technology is society made durable. in A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power,
Technology and Domination, ed. John Law, London: Routledge, 1991, 103-131.
. The Affects of Capitalism paper presented at the Royal Academy, Copenhagen, on 26th of
February, 2014.
. The Enlightenment Without the Critique: A Word on Michel Serres' Philosophy, in

52

Contemporary French Philosophy, ed. A. Phillips Griffiths, Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1987, 83-97.
. The Politics of Explanation: an Alternative in Knowledge and Reflexivity, New Frontiers in
the Sociology of Science, ed Steve Woolgar, London: Sage Publications, 1988, 155-177.
. The Recall of Modernity: Anthropological Approaches, Cultural Studies Review 13 (2007):
11-30.
. Visualization and Cognition: Drawing Things Together, in Knowledge and Society:
Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present, Vol. 6, ed. H Kuklick, Greenwich:
JAI Press, 1986, 1-32.
. Waking up from 'conjecture' as well as from 'dream' a presentation of AIME, Keynote
lecture at American Anthropological Association Meeting, 2013, Chicago, 21st
November. [http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/133-AAA-GAD-LECTURE-CHICAGO.pdf ]
(accessed 7/28/2014)
. We Have Never Been Modern, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.
. What is Given in Experience?, Boundary 2 32 (2005): 222-237.
, Where are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts, in Shaping
Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, ed. Wiebe E. Bijker and
John Law, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992, 225-258.
. Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,
Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 225-248.
Latour, Bruno, Emile Hermant, Paris ville invisible (Paris: La Dcouverte-Les Empcheurs de
spense en rond, 1998), English translation http://www.bruno-latour.fr/virtual/PARIS-INVISIBLEGB.pdf (accessed 8/12/2014)
Latour, Bruno, Philippe Mauguin, and Genevive Teil, A Note on Socio-Technical Graphs.
Social Studies of Science 22 (1992): 33-57.
Latour, Bruno, Toms Snchez-Criado. Making the 'Res Public'. Ephemera 7 (2007): 364-371.
Law, John. Organizing Modernity: Social Ordering and Social Theory, Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers, 1994.
Law, John, John Hassard. Actor Network Theory and After, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999.
Lebaron, F. Bourdieu in a multi-dimensional perspective, in Cultural Analysis and Bourdieu's
Legacy, ed. Elizabeth Silva, Alan Warde, New York: Routledge, 2010, 142-150.

53

McRae, K. D. Louis Hartz's Concept of the Fragment Society and its Application to Canada,
Canadian Studies 5 (1978): 17-30.
Mialet, Hlne. The 'Righteous Wrath' of Pierre Bourdieu, Social Studies of Science 33 (2003):
613-621.
. Where would STS be without Latour? What would be missing?, Social Studies of Science
42 (2012): 456-461.
Petrina, Stephen. The New Critiquette and Old Scholactivism: On Academic Manners,
Managers, Matters, and Freedom. Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor 20 (2012):
17-63.
Reed-Danahay, Deborah. Locating Bourdieu, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005.
Restivo, Sal. Bruno Latour: The Once and Future Philosopher. in The Wiley-Blackwell
Companion to Major Social Theorists, Vol. 2, 1st Ed. ed. George Ritzer, Jeffrey
Stepnisky, Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2011.
. Politics of Latour, Organization Environment 18 (2005): 111-115.
. Red, Black, and Objective: Science, Sociology, and Anarchism. Farnham: Ashgate
Publishing, 2011.
Schatzki, Theodore R., The Site of the Social: A Philosophical Account of the Constitution of
Social Life and Change, Penn State Press, 2010.
Schinkel, Willem. Sociological discourse of the relational: the cases of Bourdieu & Latour.
The Sociological Review 55 (2007): 707-729.
Schmidgen, Henning. The materiality of things? Bruno Latour, Charles Pguy and the history of
science, History of the Human Sciences 26 (2012): 3-28.
Sismondo, Sergio. Bourdieu's Rationalist Science of Science: Some Promises and Limitations,
Cultural Sociology, Vol. 5, No. 1 (2011): 83-97.
St. Clair, Robert N., Walter E. Rodriguez, and Carma Nelson, Habitus and Communication
Theory, Intercultural Communication Studies 14 (2005): 136-150.
Sterne, Jonathan. Bourdieu, Technique and Technology. Cultural Studies 17 (2003): 367-389.
Sterne, Jonathan, and Joan Leach, The Point of Social Construction and the Purpose of Social
Critique, Social Epistemology 19 (2005): 189-198.
Sulkunen, Pekka. Society Made Visible: On the Cultural Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. Acta
Sociologica 25 (1982): 103-115.

54

Swartz, David L. Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1997.
. From critical sociology to public intellectual: Pierre Bourdieu and politics, Theory and
Society 32, Special Issue on The Sociology of Symbolic Power: A Special Issue in
Memory of Pierre Bourdieu (2003): 791-823.
. Pierre Bourdieu and North American Political Sociology: Why He Doesn't Fit In But
Should. French Politics 4 (2006): 84-99.
Throop, C. Jason, Keith M. Murphy. Bourdieu and phenomenology: A critical assessment,
Anthropological Theory 2 (2002): 185-207.
Times Higher Education. Most cited authors of books in the humanities, 2007. Accessed
6/15/2014. http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/405956.article
Tucker, Aviezer, The Political Theory of French Science Studies in Context, Perspectives on
Science 15 (2007): 202-221.
Vandenberghe, Frdric. The Real is Relational: An Epistemological Analysis of Pierre
Bourdieu's Generative Structuralism. Sociological Theory 17 (March 1999): 32-67.
Wacquant, Loc J. D. Bourdieu in America: Notes on the Transatlantic Importation of Social
Theory, in Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives, ed. Craig Calhoun, Edward LiPuma, and
Moishe Postone (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 233-262.
. Pierre Bourdieu. in Key Sociological Thinkers, 2nd ed., ed. Rob Stones. New York:
Palgrave Macmillian London, 2008.
Webb, Jen, Tony Schirato, Geoff Danaher. Understanding Bourdieu. London: Sage Publications,
2002.

55